


Dust and Ashes

by linman



Series: Tenebrae [9]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-03
Updated: 2010-02-03
Packaged: 2017-10-07 00:04:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 29,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/59187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/linman/pseuds/linman
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A look at season seven through the eyes of Giles and Elisabeth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Elisabeth never dreamed about her death.  It had happened, as so many important things did, without the distraction of those fiddly causal ties, and Elisabeth’s dreams were always about fiddly causal ties.  She dreamed about her old jobs, her old school, her old jobs at school: personages from her past flitted in and out of doorways, scolding her.

            When she woke there was rarely any detritus to clear from her mind except what might prove distracting to the day’s work.  But it wasn’t her remembered dreams that were most likely to distract her.

            She walked to and fro between her flat and Magdalen College (and occasionally between her flat and Tesco’s, church, bookshops, and various other venues of business) with no fear of Watchers’ eyes: there were no Watchers to keep surveillance over her anymore.  Nor did she fear Bringers in broad daylight; she was not important enough to kill, a hypothesis that bore itself out day after long hardworking day.

            But her thoughts as she traversed her days were oppressed not by work but by the memory of a night when her refugee lover had broken quietly into her flat and asked her, from the darkness of the corridor, for help.  It was better she didn’t know day to day where Rupert was, or what he was doing.

            Occasionally, when she was very tired, she saw things out of the corner of her eye: the turn of a back belonging to someone she thought she knew—the flip of a familiar skirt—the sudden sense of eyes she knew from somewhere peering from behind library ranges or greengrocer’s carts.  Elisabeth dismissed this as brainfag and moved on.

            Her dreams did not change.

 

*

 

She had seen it all coming, of course; the visits.  She had warned Rupert to stay away, had told him that it was better they worked together separately on what would become the new apocalypse; but she knew he would come to her eventually.

            And he did; but Robson showed up first.  On her doorstep on a grey day in Michaelmas term, a young girl at his side, her eyes darting here and there nervously.

            “Did you bring your Potential for protection?” she asked him, with pleasant venom.

            Robson glanced around as warily as his charge.  “I need to speak to you,” he said, not meeting her eyes.

            Elisabeth folded her arms.  “And why should I give you the time of day?”

            Robson lifted his eyes to hers at last.  “No reason you should.”

            In his face was plain appeal, and Elisabeth relented.  She stepped back and let him and the girl come inside.

            What Robson wanted, of course, was Rupert.  Where was he?

            Elisabeth didn’t know, by common agreement.

            Would she get a message to him?

            Elisabeth couldn’t do that.

            Then could Elisabeth please, please, keep these books for him?  It wasn’t much, but it would help Rupert if he ever came looking for them.

            Elisabeth explained that she and Rupert had agreed he wouldn’t come near her; she couldn’t guarantee Rupert would ever find the books if Robson left them with her.

            But Robson insisted and now Elisabeth had three unprepossessing volumes added to her occult library.

            She saw Robson out her door with an unsmiling wave and a faint, “Godspeed.”  She tried not to look at the girl at all.

 

*

 

She had decided Rupert wouldn’t come, once a week or two had passed and Robson’s clandestine visit had not provoked fate to send Rupert to her door.

            But one night she woke from a sound sleep with her heart beating furiously.  There had been a sound; hadn’t there?  A slight click out in the darkness of the main room.  Elisabeth waited:  there was no other sound, but with each passing second her alertness grew in response to…she knew not what. 

            As silently as she could, she slid open the drawer of her night-table and drew out the stake she kept there, carefully honed for any emergency.  She considered briefly turning out the bedside lamp, to gain visibility into the darkness beyond the half-open bedroom door—but it would be a dead giveaway to her intruder, and she wanted the jump on him if she could possibly get it.

            Slowly she slipped her feet to the floor and rose from the bed, stake at the ready.  Yes, there it was, the sound of a footstep.

            And then a soft, sandpapered voice.  “Elisabeth.”

            She almost dropped the stake.  “Rupert?”

            “Shh!  Yes, it’s me.”

            She put the stake back into the drawer and shut it without troubling to be quiet, then hurried out to where he waited in the shadows of her livingroom.

            He drew back as she reached him in the darkness, so that her outstretched hand did not touch him.  “Rupert,” she said, “where are you?”

            “Shh!  I don’t have much time.”

            “What are you—” She swallowed the question.  She knew what he was doing here.

            “I apologize,” he whispered, “for breaking into your flat.”  He was moving again; she followed his tall shadowy outline toward the couch.

            “You—?  Oh.”  Elisabeth tried to shake the sleep from her head.

            “I’m regrouping,” Rupert said, answering the question she had swallowed.  “I don’t want anyone to know I came here, so I didn’t knock you up.  Sorry to wake you like that.”

            He didn’t sound sorry.  He didn’t sound anything.

            “Have you eaten?” Elisabeth said.

            “No.”

            “Then I’ll get you some—”

            “No! Don’t turn on any lights.”

            “I wasn’t going to,” she soothed him.

            “Right,” he said.  In the darkness she could read nothing except his voice: flat, with the faintest coil of tension beneath the surface.  She suppressed a shudder.

            Over his protests she turned on the stove lamp in the kitchen and began to heat him a cup of soup by its weak light.  After a moment she heard him brave the light to come into the kitchen; with her back to him she stirred the saucepan on the stove and absorbed every dusty, travel-weary nuance of his scent.  He had established that he didn’t want to be touched, which was just typical, because her senses were coming awake in his presence.  If he stayed very long she would begin to betray herself wanting him, whereas if he left quickly…she would merely be left to want him in the silence of her own bed.

            “You’re not staying?” she said, though she knew the answer.

            “…No,” he said, belatedly.  “I have a flight out of Heathrow in a few hours.  Before daylight.”

            She nodded, half to herself.

            When the soup was hot she poured it into a battered insulated mug, snapped the cap over the top, and turned to him.  “Here.  Drink this.”

            He reached out and took the mug from her hand; one of his fingertips brushed hers, and she turned to busy herself with the rest of the soup and pretend that a wave of longing had not just engulfed her.

            He was the same, and not the same: slightly unkempt and not too recently shaven, hurriedly clad in jeans and a shapeless canvas coat, a faint smeared spatter on his broad forehead that might have been—probably was—blood.

            She turned to him again and took the soup from his hands.  “You have time to wash,” she said.  “Go in the bathroom.  I’ve got an extra razor and some foaming cleanser.  The soup will keep hot.”

            He obeyed without a word; not a good sign.  Quietly Elisabeth washed out the saucepan and put it away, then went to see how he was doing.

            He had hung his coat on the bathroom doorknob.  She peered inside; he was shaving, quickly and carefully, with a pink disposable razor.  He had washed his face clean of whatever had spattered it.  He raised his eyes in the mirror and met hers.

            “Robson left you some books,” she told him quietly.

            He returned his eyes to his task.  “Did he.”

            “I’ll get them.”

            She went and retrieved the books Robson had left.  After a brief search in the darkness of the livingroom she found the small canvas bag which was all Rupert had brought in with him.  No provisions, no change of clothing.  Elisabeth thought a moment, then went to the closet and dug out her old army pack, the pack that had seen her through several states of the Union and two dimensions.  She felt it over carefully, shook out some crumbs, and took it over to the couch, where she packed it with Robson’s books and the materials Rupert had brought in his little bookbag.  She went to the bedroom and dug through a few drawers before she found the sweatpants and jumper Rupert had left behind the last time he’d spent the night—eons ago by any reckoning except that of calendar time.  She packed them too.  In the kitchen she emptied out her box of granola bars, raided her stash of fruit leather, and stuffed the lot into a freezer bag.  She grabbed a few more freezer bags and returned to the livingroom, where Rupert was shrugging back into his coat and rubbing at his jaw.  The faint light from the kitchen picked up the gaunt line of his face as he reached for the flap of her backpack and fingered it briefly.  “I’m not using it,” she said, her voice light as if he had asked, and moved deftly around him to pack the food.  He lifted his head; she did not wait for him to speak, but instead bustled into the bathroom with one of the freezer bags to pick him out some travel-size soaps and gels, which were left languishing in a drawer from her vagabond days.  She added a cheap plastic-wrapped toothbrush for good measure, sealed the bag, and returned to him, to pack it.

            Rupert was still just standing there.  “Don’t forget your soup,” Elisabeth said, and went to get it for him.

            He still didn’t move when she held out the cup to him.  Finally he made a small gesture in the darkness, and lifted his head to meet her look.

            “They’re all dead,” he said in a whisper.

            She reached out, found his hand, and curled it softly around the warm cup.  “They won’t be the last to die,” she said, her voice as low as his.

            They said nothing else after that. Rupert downed as much of the soup as he could take, then silently handed Elisabeth the mug and shouldered the pack.  He held still while she adjusted the straps, which were stiff and stubborn after many years of being used to the shape of Elisabeth’s shoulders.

            At the door (he had picked the lock without breaking it), they paused together just before he went out.  Their faces were mere inches apart in the darkness, their mutual gaze nearly obscured.  She drew in a breath and moved ever so faintly toward him: it was all the goodbye kiss she would attempt.  He returned the gesture with a brief closing of the eyes, and then the moment was over and he was out the door and down the unlighted steps.

            “Godspeed,” she mouthed into the darkness, and closed the door without watching his retreating back down the silent street.

 

*

 

He was on her mind often after that, sidling into the edgespaces between tasks, with her as she beat feet on the pavement, to and fro.

            Once Elisabeth went with friends on a rowing party, something she had always wanted to do but never quite got around to.  The sky was cloudless, the air perfect with the sharp tang of autumn that matched the sparkle of sun on the water’s surface.  The spirit among her party was carnival, frivolous, giddy and chattering.  And yet none of this could shake Elisabeth’s sense of a great calm before a thunderstorm, as if the sparkle and the chatter and the light plash of water could be rolled up like a windowshade at any moment—

            There.  Who _was_ that, dangling her bare legs over the pier?

            Elisabeth turned, to get the attention of one of her friends, who were all laughing at a joke someone had made.  But by the time she got it, the girl on the pier had vanished.

            Elisabeth shook her head, to clear it, and joined in the laughter.

 

*

 

Elisabeth stopped dreaming altogether; her nights gathered themselves up into a pressured underwater silence.

 

*

 

Christmas came and went: Elisabeth zipped the lining into her burberry and walked faster when she went out.  She ate Christmas dinner with Brian, who was moodily avoiding his parents.  “Are you all right?” he asked once as he topped up her glass of nog.  “You seem a little distant.”

            She blinked in surprise.  “I’m fine,” she said.

 

*

 

She heard nothing from Rupert.  There was no need to worry about this, and she didn’t: but it was uncanny the way she seemed to see things in her peripheral vision whenever he came to her thoughts.  Elisabeth threw herself into her work.

 

*

 

Her thesis was shaping up: a towering (or so it seemed) work on the role of fairytale in genre and literary theory.  Elisabeth had spent arduous hours in various libraries narrowing her focus, first so far, then farther, choosing authors, dates, specimens for close reading; themes.  Doppelgangers, the quest narrative, the dream narrative, the suspension of morality and empirical certainty, all waited under her fingers like chords on a piano.  And always, under the surface, a dissonance she couldn’t tease out.

            The first time it truly happened, it was silent, almost meaningless.  She was crossing Radcliffe Camera, and as she moved she saw to her side, across the way, a mirror where she had seen no mirror before.  The image of herself was there; then gone, in a flash as of an altered reflection.  Elisabeth actually went ten steps before stopping and returning to the spot where she had seen it.

            Of course there was no mirror.  Her mind was playing tricks on her again.  Elisabeth faltered a step or two toward the empty place; then shook her head and forced herself to resume her original course.

            But the uncertainty had begun.  It remained, even when days passed and Elisabeth saw nothing else.  Distressing memories rose for her when she looked up from her work, of the bad days when a week-long episode began with the hallucinations—dark spots, shadows in her peripheral vision, possible bugs or spiders or malignant people, gone in an instant, never quite real enough to frighten her completely, just real enough to make her check and relax, check and relax, until she was tired and the episode took over.

            She had enjoyed the best health she’d ever known, these years since she crossed dimensions.  There was no reason to suppose that these flickers were anything but the last debris of worry about Rupert and the coming apocalypse.

            Days passed, and nothing else happened.  There was no news, there were no hallucinations.  But Elisabeth slept badly.

            This, too, could be taken in stride.

 

*

 

It was, in a sickening sort of way, almost a relief when it began in earnest.  The silence in her flat had grown thick and oppressive, her mind tired from attending to her peripheral vision and seeing nothing.

            She broke off from her work one cold evening and went into the kitchen to make herself some soup and a grilled cheese sandwich.  She was buttering the first slice of bread as the pan heated, when a voice spoke into her homely silence, where no voice should be.  A voice she knew intimately, a voice she had heard every day of her life.  Of both her lives.

            “Whatcha makin’?”

            Elisabeth went hot and cold.  Slowly she forced herself to turn to the side and look at this violation.

            Herself to the life: the glasses, the soft blond down on her arms, the whimsical stance, the half-academic-professional, half-comfortable-at-home clothing; the awkward straggles of her pinned-up soft brown hair.

            Another hallucination, Elisabeth thought desperately.  But she knew better.  Shakily she reached and turned the heat off under the now-smoking pan.  Then she stretched forth a hand to touch her mirror image, with a feeling almost of curiosity.  Her counterpart made no effort to elude her touch, but her hand made no contact, as how she would touch an optical illusion.  Elisabeth drew back her hand.  There was nothing there; so why did she suddenly feel as if her soul were irreparably dirty?

            Her mirror image raised an ironic eyebrow.  Elisabeth had had no idea how insolent that gesture looked on her face.

            She swallowed dry-throated and spoke into the full silence, looking herself in the eye.

            “I know you,” she said.

            Her mirror image softened into a smile of distressing intimacy.

            “Yes,” she said, “you do.”


	2. Chapter 2

These days Rupert went to sleep with his mother singing the old lullabies in his ears.  He ignored her steadily night after night, and after a while it became eerily easy to feel nothing.  Easy until, of course, the First grew bored with that and came to him as someone else, as it surely would any time now.

            “Giles!  You’re not listening,” Buffy said.

            Rupert tossed himself over, so that he could not see the sudden vision of Buffy in his hotel room, but it did no good; Buffy instantly reappeared on the other side of the rickety bed.

            “Are you getting bored with me?” Buffy inquired, cocking her head to one side.

            “Q.E.D.,” Rupert said, and turned over again.

            Rupert had not quite managed to get used to the First as Buffy, but he had, after some trouble, managed to submerge the physical recoil.

            He was, however, unfortunately out of scotch.

            “Too bad you’re out of scotch,” Buffy said, sitting in her phantom way on the foot of the bed.  “Guess you’re stuck with me tonight.”

            Rupert bit his tongue before he could say that he wasn’t tired of her.  He wasn’t tired of Buffy, but Buffy wasn’t here.

            And maybe he really was perhaps the littlest bit tired of Buffy.

            He suspected the First knew it.  But if so, it was waiting till a more opportune time to play that card.

 

*

 

If Rupert went to sleep with his mother’s lullabies, he woke up next to Jenny Calendar, dead and glassy-eyed, just as Angelus had arranged her.  The first time that happened Rupert had recoiled so hard he fell out of the bed and hit the floor with a reverberating flump, an animal cry racking his throat.  He had spent the next ten minutes under a cold shower, not even fully undressed, face under the spray, weeping hoarsely; Jenny wandering around the bathroom on the other side of the shower curtain, asking Rupert what was wrong.

            Score a touchdown for the First, plus the two-point conversion _and_ a recovered fumble on the kickoff.

            After that first morning, however, Rupert collected his faculties and set himself to assume a blasé demeanor even if he had it not.  He woke up next to Jenny every morning and gave her the look you would give a drying worm on the sidewalk.  The First appeared to be endlessly amused by this look: Rupert found that out when one morning Jenny suddenly became Buffy in her yummy sushi pajamas, hugging her knees in the bed as he got out of it, all soft golden skin and childlike eyes.  She said, “You know who you look like when you make that I’m-strong-dammit face?”

            Rupert did not deign to ask who.

            “Wesley.”  And Buffy fell over in a fit of giggles on the bed.

            Rupert gave her a withering look and went to get his shower.  He had a meeting with another girl’s parents in an hour.

 

*

 

Half the world away, Elisabeth woke to the sound of her own voice, singing cheerfully somewhere in the flat.  If the First could, it’d be doing house chores for even better effect; Lord knew the flat needed it—Elisabeth had somehow let herself get behind with the housekeeping.  “I’m not a morning person,” Elisabeth shouted hoarsely from the heap of covers she hid under nightly.  If her doppelganger thought that constituted being caught out in a mischaracterization, it gave no sign; the singing merely stopped, and for a few hours Elisabeth had respite.

            Then it began again.

 

*

 

Particularly wearing were the fresh images of girls he failed to save, repeated for him on a seemingly endless loop for the first few hours after each time he came upon the scene of carnage or the funeral (he was growing morbidly familiar with customs of grieving the world over).  One particularly trying day ended with Rupert drinking himself to sleep in his hotel room, Quentin Travers keeping him company in the worn armchair next the bed.  “Bad business, this, Giles,” he said.

            “Yes,” Rupert said on a swig direct from the bottle, “bad business indeed.  Have I ever told you what a pernicious thoroughgoing rotten bastard you are?”

            “No,” Quentin said, “but I knew it anyway.  You’ve taken up being honest, I see.  You’ll come to a bad end that way.”  And he chuckled.

 

*

 

“How’s the thesis coming?” Elisabeth’s shade asked her kindly.

            “It’s not,” Elisabeth said, with her forehead in her hand, eyes immobile on the book.  “Duh.”

            The not-Elisabeth sighed.  “Guess that’s what comes of trying to make academic hay out of your own life.”

            “I’d like to know what else you make it out of,” Elisabeth said tightly.

            “Oh, I don’t know.  Whatever real academics use.  I wouldn’t know.”

 

*

 

“You really are putting a lot of effort into this thing,” Angel said, panthering his way across the hotel room (another room, another bed, another hotel, just like the last).  “I mean, the whole nine yards, all for the Gipper.  —I ever tell you I met Knute Rockne?  _Nice_ guy.”

            Rupert lay faceup on the bed, the seraphic look on his face not even achieved with scotch.  “Why don’t you try being my favorite Watchers for a while?” he said, his voice equally seraphic.

            Angel waved a hand.  “That’s too easy.  Jeez, give me some credit for creativity.”

            “I could never fail to do that,” Rupert said.  Somewhere within himself he thought vaguely that it was probably a bad sign that he felt so relieved to be talking back.  It no longer seemed to matter that it wasn’t really Angel, or Buffy, or Quentin speaking to him: he could say all sorts of things he’d wanted to say to their real counterparts, and no one would ever know.  Except the First, who was the _world’s_ worst gossip.

            Angel came around to the side of the bed and looked down at him affectionately.  “You always were a tough nut to crack.  You’ve got such _style_.  You know my favorite part of your style?”

            “What?”  Rupert’s eyes remained on the ceiling.  He had always known he’d come back here eventually: the veritable lover’s dance between himself and Angel, uninterrupted by imminent apocalypse or rescue by Xander Harris, carried to the fine exquisite ecstasy of torturer and tortured.  He went with it.

            “Your moral grandeur.”  Angel savored the words with a thin smile.  “It doesn’t come _from_ you, you see: it comes _through_ you.  Can’t touch it that way.  Can’t take it away if you refuse to have it.”

            It was a great compliment.  Rupert drew it in like sweet breath; then next moment something had waked him and he sat up hot with fright or shame, he didn’t know which.  He got off the bed and walked straight through Angel to the sink, where he turned on the cold tap and splashed his face again and again.

            He turned around, face dripping, to see Angel smiling at him.  Angel winked.  “Almost had ya,” he said, and disappeared.

            Rupert turned back to the sink and began to wash his hands.  He kept it up for ten straight minutes.

 

*

 

Elisabeth took to spending whatever time she could in the company of other people.  But more often than not her bid for normalcy backfired: her friends and colleagues didn’t quite know what to make of her pale distraction, or how to interpret the chase of disconnected emotions across her face, as if she were having a conversation with no one.  “You’re becoming a time-honored Oxford phenomenon,” someone told her kindly over a glass of sherry, “an Eccentric.”

            Elisabeth’s other self, standing behind her friend’s shoulder, gave a great snort.

            She had hovered, like a paralyzed kid on the high dive, on the verge of telling Brian what was happening.  But she always lost heart for anything beyond explaining to him that the evil was growing stronger.  That in itself was problematic; Brian wanted to know how she knew, if she wasn’t in touch with Rupert, what was happening with the evil.  Elisabeth, with the taunts of her other self in her ears, could not bring herself to say.

            The hardest part was not letting her eyes follow herself around the room while she was with other people.  They couldn’t see or hear it, and she knew she must look crazed, but she couldn’t help herself sometimes, watching her own hijinks.  It had occurred to her more than once that she was a natural candidate for the Ministry of Funny Walks, and she had never known it.  She had also never realized that the surprised, worried look she had often seen in the bathroom mirror was her habitual expression; or how off-putting it was.  How on earth had she ever had any friends at all, or lovers?

            One evening, sitting in the makeshift livingroom of Brian’s bedsitter, she took a sudden opportunity, while Brian was in the kitchen making coffee, to ask:  “What is it you want from me, anyway?”

            Her mirror image lounged up against the bookshelves that formed the livingroom’s wall.  “Only lawyers should ask questions they already know the answers to,” she said.

            Elisabeth stared at her counterpart as she grinned, until Brian joggled her shoulder.  “Elisabeth.  Elisabeth.  Here’s your coffee.”

            Elisabeth took her coffee without looking at him and sipped it, her wary eyes on her First-self, who began to prowl the room, circling her and Brian where they sat on his couch.  “Tell him,” she hissed at Elisabeth with another grin.

            Elisabeth had the feeling the First wasn’t entirely talking about Brian.  She closed her teeth against her retort and lifted the coffee to her lips; sipped, and tasted nothing.

            “Elisabeth,” Brian said in a small voice, “will you please tell me what’s wrong?”

            Elisabeth could feel Brian’s gaze on the side of her face, desperate and worried.  She heard herself say, “It’s too hard to explain.”

            “Oh, stop _lying_ to the poor boy,” the First-Elisabeth said.  “It’s perfectly simple.  Just tell him that you’re keeping the info from him because he’s out of his league.  Isn’t that what you’re good at?”

            Elisabeth glared at her.

            “I mean,” Brian said, “I understand that there’s an evil, and it’s taking a toll.  I just—”

            “‘A Neevil?  What’s a Neevil?  Maybe it’s him,’” said Elisabeth’s shade, whimsically.

            “—just don’t understand what’s going on with _you_.”

            “Don’t you quote C.S. Lewis at me,” Elisabeth said, gritting her teeth.

            “What?” Brian said, startled.  “I didn’t.  I wasn’t quoting.”

            “Not you,” Elisabeth said.

            “Elisabeth,” Brian said, exasperated, “there’s no one else here.”

            If she turned her head she would see the fright she knew was on his face, and she couldn’t bear it.  She burst into tears, and instantly the First began to mimic her crying perfectly.

            “Just make it stop,” Elisabeth wept.

            She felt Brian taking the coffee out of her hands and setting it on the table; then he gathered her into his arms.  “Shh, love.  Shh.  I’m sorry I pushed you.  Don’t worry.  It’s all right.”  His hand stroked back the hair at her temple with a tenderness that opened her grief wide.  She cried, vying with her shadow for the loudest, most pitiful keening and unable to stop it from escalating.

            “Oh, sweetie,” Brian said, his voice thick; he held her closer.

            When she couldn’t cry anymore she choked to a stop, huffing softly in Brian’s arms.  The First went on mimicking her weeping a few more seconds, then tailed off into soft laughter.

            Elisabeth had come to loathe the sound of her own voice.

            Brian held her away from him and pulled out his handkerchief.  It used to make her laugh without fail; Brian didn’t at all look the sort who would carry linen, and she knew for a fact he wasn’t raised to.  It was one of his endearing quirks.

            He wiped her face gently with the handkerchief.  “I think,” he said, “you should take the day off tomorrow.  Do no work whatsoever.  Just stay in bed and drink tea and sleep.  All right?”

            “It won’t help,” Elisabeth said, taking the handkerchief so she could blow her nose.

            Brian, holding her shoulders, looked at her with tight-lipped chagrin.

            “What can I do for you?” he said.

            She began to shake her head, but he persisted.  “I can do something.  What can I do?”

            “You can die,” said the First.

            Elisabeth kept her eyes on Brian’s face, willing herself not to give in to the sudden terror she felt plucking at her nape.

            “Want me to come and stay the night with you?”

            Elisabeth sniffed.  “If it’s not too much trouble,” she said, in a voice she hadn’t used since she was a girl.

            “Right then,” Brian said.  “I’ll pack a bag.”

 

*

 

At home Brian put Elisabeth to bed, but it was a little while before he could make her a cup of tea, as there were no clean cups in the flat.  Elisabeth tried to ignore Brian’s glances over the squalor of her living space, but it was harder when he turned a glance on her in the bed that clearly said:  _Why didn’t you tell me?_

            So instead of camping out on the couch Brian got to work cleaning the flat, moving quietly so Elisabeth could sleep.  But sleep was far from her mind at this point; she waited patiently for either herself or for Bringers to arrive.  She really shouldn’t have asked Brian to stay with her—it only put him in danger—but she figured that he was really no safer in his own home than with her, and she wanted at least to think she was protecting him.

            Oh, damn.  She really was going to have to tell him what was happening.

            “In case you’re wondering,” the First said, “I’m not sending any Bringers after your little friend.”

            “Am I supposed to think that’s a relief?” Elisabeth said, without looking over at where her mirror image had appeared on the bed next to her.

            “He’s not worth it.”  Elisabeth’s face smiled down at her.  “Incidentally, you aren’t either.”

            “Q.E.D.  So what are _you_ doing here then?”

            The First-Elisabeth shrugged her shoulders.  “Pretty much just amusing myself.”

            Elisabeth closed her eyes calmly.  “Oh?  Not carrying out a campaign to fuck up Rupert’s role in the apocalypse by getting me to tell him what’s coming?”

            Elisabeth heard her own laughter coming from the First, but this time didn’t even wince.  “I don’t need you to fuck Rupert up.  I have him well in hand.  He’s coming along very nicely.”  Her voice softened and sang the words, as if she were singing Elisabeth a lullaby.

            But she broke off the lull and said, “You’re right, of course.  There’s no way your information could help him.  Of course, he doesn’t know that.  All he can do in that case is to trust you.  What a thing it is to be trusted,” the First mused, “...more precious than silver, or gold, or whatever that silly song says.  What on earth possessed you to spend so many years among the Baptists?”

            “They call me crazy,” Elisabeth said, not opening her eyes.

            “That they do, my dear,” the First said:  “that they do.”

            Elisabeth opened her eyes to an empty room, but she felt no respite.

            A few minutes later Brian appeared with a steaming mug.  “Brought your tea,” he said.  He placed it on the nightstand for her.  She smiled briefly and thanked him.

            But instead of going away he stood next to her bed and studied her face.  “Who were you talking to just now?” Brian asked, as if he were forcing the words out.

            “Myself,” Elisabeth said.

 

*

 

Rupert lay on the camp bed, suppressing the shivers that yearned to take over his muscles.  His nerves were fraught; Buffy’s shade had been chattering at him all day, now throwing incomprehensibly arcane pop-culture references at him, now lamenting her lot as the Slayer who didn’t get to stay dead, now musing philosophically about the myriad ways he had failed her.  He had worked hard to pretend that her veiled references to the Cruciamentum delivered from behind the real Buffy’s shoulder hadn’t rattled him; but now he was tired, and all he wanted to do was go to sleep.

            But the First had other ideas.

            “Giles,” Tara said, “you look really tired.  Don’t you think you should relax and rest?”

            Rupert turned over, carefully so as not to tip the cot, and glared at her.  “I would do, if you’d kindly shut up.”

            Tara smiled.  “I could tell you a bedtime story.  I always tell Willow a bedtime story when she’s stressed.  I could tell you one.  Of course—” Tara’s smile quirked like a cat’s— “I did other things for Willow before she went to sleep, that you probably wouldn’t be interested in.”  But then her expression changed and she cocked her head to look at him in a new light.  “Or maybe you would.”

            Rupert squinted at her in amazed disgust.  “What on earth makes you think I’d be interested?”

            “Well,” Tara said, “you’ve been without for a long time, haven’t you?  Your girlfriend sent you away.  Not very nice.  I’m no substitute, and I can’t touch you, but I can give you a little something....”

            And to Rupert’s horror she began to pull her shirt up and over her head.  She wasn’t wearing a bra, and her breasts fell free, her generous flesh warm in the dim gold lamplight.

            “You don’t know a thing about Tara, do you?” Rupert said, his voice shaking.  He turned over and shut his eyes tight, no longer able to hide the quiver in his limbs, or fully suppress the shameful response the First had wrung from him.

            And then he heard a laughing voice that drove an electric chill through every cell in his body.

            “God, Rupert.  You’re so _porous_.  I can soak into you from everywhere; it’s hardly even sporting.”

            His breath turned to iron in his lungs, and he forced himself over to look at the abomination.  What he saw wrung his heart afresh.

            Elisabeth stood, cleaning her phantom glasses on the tail of her fuzzy white shirt, a drift of soft hair falling into her face and catching the lamplight.

            “You’re not,” Rupert faltered, “you can’t be—”

            “Dead?” Elisabeth finished for him, looking up from her task.  “You tell me.”

            Rupert thought fast, his whole body as dizzy as his head.  “You died—in the doorway—but you came back—”  He stopped.  There was no way to know if Elisabeth’s form was available to the First because of her temporary death, or because she had recently met with one more permanent.

            “Go ahead,” Elisabeth said, returning her glasses to her face.  “Make the call.”

            Rupert was on his feet before she had even finished saying the words, and he had gone twelve steps before his next thought.  But then he halted, and turned back to face her.  “No,” he said, his voice hard.

            They had agreed to do this separately.  He had promised to honor her request.

            “No?” Elisabeth said, with a slight smile.  She had sat down incorporeally on his cot after he left it.  “Very well then.  Sit down.  We’ll chat.”

            She patted the cot at her side.


	3. Chapter 3

“Are you sure you don’t need me to...?”  Brian stood uneasily in the entryway, his overnight bag at his feet.

            “I’m sure,” Elisabeth said.  “You can go home.  I’ll be all right.”

            He gave her a long look; but her gaze was steady, if hollow.  Finally Brian nodded and picked up his bag.

            On the threshold he paused to look round at her once more.  He opened his mouth, shut it again.

            Elisabeth answered the question he would not ask.  “I’ll explain to you some of what’s happening,” she said quietly, “after I get some more sleep.”

            Brian gave her a soft nod.  “Right.”

            And then he was gone, off into the broad light of day.

            “God,” the First said.  “I thought he’d never leave.”

            Elisabeth gave her reflection a slow, ironic look and shut the door.  She went into the newly-cleaned kitchen and began to make herself a cup of tea.

            The First followed her.  “You’re not really planning to tell him anything.”

            “Dunno,” Elisabeth said.  “Maybe I will.”

            “’Fraid it’ll strain his credulity?”

            “Not afraid of it,” Elisabeth said.  “I know it.”

            “And you’re willing to take the risk.”

            “I _am_ the risk,” Elisabeth said.

            “Well, at least I’ve taught you something.”

 

*

 

In a rare moment when Rupert judged he might be alone, he crept to the phone, lifted the receiver, and dialed Elisabeth’s number.  After the third ring, his courage failed him and he took the phone away from his ear, just at the moment when there was a click and Elisabeth’s voice said flatly, “Hello?...Hello?”

            Rupert didn’t answer.  Slowly he put the phone back down.

            “Feel better now?” Elisabeth’s voice inquired.

            Rupert turned and gave the First the same look Elisabeth had given her, if he had only known it.  He made no answer.

            “Of course you don’t,” the Elisabeth-First said cheerfully.  “Now you know she’s alive, it just makes things that much harder.”

            “I don’t see how,” Rupert said.

            He had intended it to be a bitter rhetorical retort, but the First explained as if he had asked in earnest.

            “Well,” she said, “now you have to figure out what to do with her.  I mean, she’s a wild card.”

            “She’s not involved,” Rupert said, as if explaining it to a child.

            “You’re wrong about that.  She’s tried not to be, pretty much from day one, but she knows it’s futile and you ought to know it too.  After all, you’re the one who’s spent so much time and effort pursuing her.”

            “And she’s right that this isn’t her fight,” Rupert said flatly.

            “No,” the First agreed, “it’s yours.”

            “Then leave her out of it.”  Rupert hadn’t meant to say that quite so loudly.  But the others were outside, and no one heard him.

            There was a long silence, then the First spoke equably.  “You don’t know Elisabeth like I do, you know.”  And as Rupert glared at her, she added, “I know her very well indeed.  I _am_ Elisabeth, you see.  Or, rather, she is me.”

            “It’s a lie,” Rupert said.

            “Is it?” The phantom Elisabeth took her glasses off and blew lightly on them.  “Then what did she see a few years ago, when you tried to take her to a higher spiritual plane?”

            The words were dragged out of him:  “Her fears.”

            “True fears,” the First said, with a gentle smile.  “She’s an intelligent woman; she knows you were trying to snow her.”

            “No,” Rupert said, quietly.

            “No?”  The First-Elisabeth looked up, cocking her head.  “Have it your way then.”  She put her glasses back on.  “But do you ever wonder why she holds you at arm’s length?  Why she’ll take any opportunity to keep you away from her?”

            Rupert gave her no answer.

            “All this time, and you don’t understand her—admittedly misguided—impulse to protect your naivete?”

            Rupert remained silent, but a muscle jumped in his jaw.

            “She’s afraid of what she can do to you.  She knows her power is an illicit power.”

            Rupert folded his arms.  “So what?”

            The First wandered closer, making a circuit of the room.  “Well...do you recall the reason she gave for not telling you your future?”

            Rupert knew perfectly well, but he waited for the First to answer its own question.

            “Something, if I remember, about Oedipus Rex?”

            “You’re not going to make me ask her to change her commitment,” Rupert said, drawing a tight breath.

            The First-Elisabeth snorted.  “I’m not going to make you do anything,” she said, with sagging disparagement.  “That’s not my point.  My _point_ is that Elisabeth doesn’t realize that she’s now part of the play too.”

            This thought had occurred to Rupert, more than once.  “That doesn’t matter,” he said.

            “Oh, but it does.  You see, she thinks she can fight me all by herself.  She thinks all she has to do is hold on long enough, and I’ll go away and never bother her again.  She has,” the First smiled, “a very endearing stubbornness.  Not unlike your own, really.”

            Rupert’s stomach coiled and uncoiled.  “It still doesn’t matter.”

            “If you say so,” the First said, giving an unconcerned shrug as it finished its circuit of the room.  “It’s just that—well, you know, I have a privileged access to her, and it’s just a matter of time before she crumbles.  I give it a few more days, and then her fears will be realized.”

            Rupert swallowed hardily.  “She told me she could take care of herself.”

            “She wasn’t lying,” the First said.  She gave him Elisabeth’s loveliest smile.  Rupert looked away.

            “You could leave it the way it is, of course,” the First-Elisabeth said.  “But what are you going to do if someone with Elisabeth’s kind of power takes a hand?  And what if she doesn’t take your side?”

            With one last smile the First disappeared.

            Rupert half-turned, looking for solace as if it might be a knickknack or vase sitting on the sideboard.  All he saw was the phone.

            He could call Elisabeth back, compare notes with her on what the First was saying.  Obviously, he knew now, the First had been appearing to her too—or at least managing to offer suggestions to her in some veiled fashion.  They could straighten out the lies together.

            But maybe that was playing right into the First’s hands.  Suppose he tried to reassure her that she was not evil at heart; what if that was the last straw that drove her to darkness?

            What if it was true that she was already of the darkness?  The First told its strongest lies with the truth.

            Rupert shut his eyes.  It didn’t bear thinking of.  But one thing was clearly true—he would have to decide what to do.

            The question was, what?

 

*

 

The phone rang, and Elisabeth hurried out of the bedroom, where she’d been making the bed after her prolonged nap, to pick it up.

            “Hello?”

            There was no answering voice.

            “Hello?” she said again.

            There was a click, and the line went dead.

            Elisabeth put the phone down with a sour look.  Now, on top of everything, she was going to have to get a caller ID device.  She blew out her cheeks and surveyed her clean livingroom.  Brian had done a very thorough job, scrubbing the kitchen back to a sanitary shine, tidying books and papers into neat piles, and running several loads of laundry.  He was a good friend: but now Elisabeth didn’t have anything material to do to distract herself.

            Except work.  Elisabeth was not too anxious to get back to the books; they had not been kind to her lately, not with the First prowling around, making observations from the peanut gallery.  In fact, her eyes still felt gritty from the sleep that had made not the least dent in her weariness, and she doubted they’d stand up to prolonged study.

            So instead of doing anything Elisabeth sat down heavily in her creaky desk chair and stared across the livingroom. 

            She wondered what she was going to do, when the storm finished.  If the storm finished; and probably it would, as the others had done.  She wondered if it would be feasible to continue her course of study as if nothing had happened, just as it was rapidly becoming infeasible to study as usual now.  She wondered if Rupert, tired as he surely was and more than half-broken, would find it feasible to continue with her.  Perhaps he would find that he would have to leave, would have to take up his work and do nothing else, or else burn out completely and make off for Tibet or something.

            Perhaps he wouldn’t actually survive.

            Perhaps she would not.

            Elisabeth had thought about it more than once.  Her existence in this dimension had clearly introduced a lacuna, perhaps more than one.  Perhaps it would be resolved if she were a casualty in this, the last great Sunnydale war.  The important thing was that the First be defeated:  and since she knew she could not bear a direct hand in that, the only thing left was to wait.

            To hold on.

            It was not even necessary to trust Rupert, or any of the others, to catch her; the only thing was the freefall.  It was all that was left.

            She was not in the least surprised when the next thing she heard was the voice of herself as the First.  “‘We’re animals, and we don’t change.  We’re Badgers, what’s more, and we hold on.’”  She heard her own soft laughter; but she did not turn around to look.

            She sat without moving and quietly bid goodbye to hope.

 

*

 

Rupert had given up ever trying to sleep.  He kept himself functioning by taking small cat naps in whatever chair wasn’t either occupied or the center of the frenetic energy of shouting girls, and Andrew.  If the First hadn’t been going all out before, it was now:  Buffy, Elisabeth, Jenny, his parents, dead Potentials, dead Watchers, Joyce, Angel, sometimes even Spike, all chattered at him endlessly, sometimes letting the meaning show behind their words, sometimes not.  It was becoming difficult to distinguish between the living chatter and ruckus of the house and the stream of words coming from the various shades attending him.  He was even beginning to forget that the First ever attacked anyone else.

            There was one morning, however, when Rupert sat dozing over coffee, and the thought clearly came to him, in a voice oddly like his father’s but unmistakably his own:  _You have no reason to believe what the First says about Elisabeth, or anybody else.  It’s meant to derail you from your course_.

            If only Rupert knew what his course was.

            To him, his course seemed more like a demolition derby than anything else, with or without the First Evil.  Rupert had always just gone with it, had always given his professional opinion as a Watcher and then sat back and let the shit hit the fan.  It had worked before, and even when it didn’t, he had always had the thankless jobs to fall back on.  Not that anyone tended to notice that.  They all fell upon his wisdom in emergencies, and then reviled him when he did not simply solve a problem for them.  Rupert was tired.  Not fed up, exactly, he told himself, just tired.

            It had been so long since Rupert had given in to the urge toward self-pity:  he was rarely troubled by the temptation to believe one deserves, or does not deserve, what happens to one.  A Watcher couldn’t afford to believe that; there was the doing, and there was the waiting; and that was all.  And he was one of the only Watchers left—the last one, certainly, to train a called Slayer.  Whatever happened, nothing would be the same.

            Quite possibly they might all die.  He might die.

            The thought gave him neither comfort nor anxiety.  But if he did not expect to survive, he might as well throw himself into whatever thankless task came his way.

            This, he realized, was what Elisabeth had meant when she said she needed him free to risk his own life, without regard for her.  At the time he had responded with near-tears of exasperated admiration.

            Now, he felt nothing except the certainty of this little death, this little cutting-off.  He had intended never to make use of Elisabeth’s gift; but now he knew surely that he would.

            It was no decision; it was hardly even a thought.  Rupert lifted his coffee, sipped.

 

*

 

“He has forgotten you,” the First told Elisabeth.

            Elisabeth did not look up.  “I have intended that he should.”

            “Everything’s going exactly according to plan, is it?”

            “Plan?” Elisabeth said, turning a page.  “There’s a plan?”

            “‘There seems no plan because it is all plan.  Blessed be He!’”  The First managed to turn the quote into a sneer.  Elisabeth waited for the First to make commentary, either on C.S. Lewis or on the praise of God, but it did neither; the First was eminently practical.

            “Do you ever wonder why you’re here?” it asked.

            Elisabeth rolled her eyes.  “Forty-two,” she said.

            “Well, you’ve been so anxious to preserve the story as you know it.”  The First was using Elisabeth’s own patient arguing voice, the one she used to nail down points in an essay before she wrote it.  “That seems to argue a plan.  So what are _you_ doing in it?”

            “I don’t know,” Elisabeth said.  “I don’t suppose it matters much.”

            “But there seems to be enough narrative wiggle-room for you to fit.”

            “Seemingly,” Elisabeth said.

            “No, really.”  The First wandered around so that it was before Elisabeth where she sat at her desk.  “You’re fitting this world like a hand in a glove.  Don’t you think you have a little part to play yourself?”

            “No,” Elisabeth said, refusing to look up.

            “As you like,” the First said.  “But what happens if you sit on your hands, and your vital role goes on unplayed?  Suppose you take no action, and it all falls apart?  You know your chaos theory.  Your role doesn’t have to be bombastic to be essential.”

            “For want of a nail, etc.,” Elisabeth said dryly.

            “Well…more or less.”  The First shrugged.

            “Funny.”  Elisabeth hung her arm over the back of her chair and looked up at herself.  “A while ago you were saying just the opposite, that I wasn’t important enough to kill.”

            “They’re not necessarily mutually exclusive,” the First said, narrowing her eyes.  “Are you getting smart with me?”

            “I don’t see what I have to lose,” Elisabeth said, giving her mirror image the full benefit of her sardonic look.

            For a moment the First went very still; Elisabeth saw her own signs of anger thinning the lips and raising the shoulders.  “Golly gee,” she said.  “Have I really pissed off the First Evil?”

            All at once the First let its shoulders fall and smiled.  “Not enough to kill you.  Maybe enough to hurt you.”

            She tossed her head.  “Cause you’re not doing _that_ already.”

            Elisabeth never thought her lips could smile so thinly, so venomously.  “Ohh, I’ve only just begun to hurt you,” the First whispered.  “You may have been able to bluff the Watchers’ Council, but you can’t bluff me.  I have no ancient code for you to cling to.  I am _power_.  And I can bring your whole world crashing down around your ears.  Don’t you remember what you saw under meditation?  That was real, you know.  I can bring that straight to the surface to rule you.”  And as Elisabeth glared, she snapped, “Do you think I can’t?  I’ll bring your darkness to the surface, and then I’ll send him to you primed to rescue you, and then he can watch me devour you.  Will he be worth anything then?”

            “No.”  The word burst out of Elisabeth beyond her control.

            “Maybe _you_ can’t destroy the story you know, but _he_ can.  _I_ can.  And I will.”

            “You won’t,” Elisabeth said softly.

            “We’ll see,” said the First.  “At the very least I can destroy you.  I think I will.  I could use some recreation.”

            And it vanished.

            “It’s nice to know what you’ve got planned,” Elisabeth said to the empty air.

 

*

 

Days passed, and the First would not let Elisabeth sleep.  “Don’t you feel yourself slipping?” she crooned in the small hours of one bleak morning.

            Elisabeth could feel the relief on the other side of admitting it, but instead she poured her will into resistance.  It was this as much as anything that kept her awake, and the First knew it.  “People who resist me always follow this pattern,” she said.  “They bluff, they stay vigilant.  And just when they’ve won, they turn around and throw themselves back into it.  They want the completion of losing.  It’s like playing a scale up to the seventh and stopping—the musically-inclined just have to go up and play the octave, just to ease their minds.  As soon as you feel I’ve gone, you’ll turn and give yourself to me with open hands.”

            Elisabeth had almost lost her voice from lack of sleep; but she did not even try to retort.

            “I notice you’re up to seven phone messages now.  Three of them from your teachers.  Four from Brian.  When are you going to call that poor boy back?”

            “Shut up,” Elisabeth croaked.

 

*

 

“They’re still looking at you,” Spike’s shade said to Rupert.  “They know you’ve gone off it.”

            “As if it matters,” Rupert said, dragging his pen listlessly across the notebook page.

            “Well,” Spike snorted comfortably, “_I_ always knew you were a bit strange upstairs.  But then, I know who you’re thinking about.”

            Rupert said nothing.

            “All that gold mine of information, and you haven’t got the nads to get it.”

            Rupert said nothing.

            “She holds it away from you, like you can’t be trusted.  Who’s she to play God?”

            “Shut up—” Rupert almost added, “—Spike,” but caught himself in time.

            “Oh, right,” Spike said dryly.  “Everybody _else_ is a fool at love, but _you_ are noble.  Don’t you see she’s playing you?”

            “It doesn’t matter.”

            Spike sputtered into a laugh.  “Doesn’t matter?  Right.  Believe that if you want.  But while you’re busy being noble and naïve, your little girlfriend is canoodling with me every night.  You don’t pump her soon enough, she’ll be too far gone and you’ll never reach her—and I don’t mean to rescue.”

            Rupert’s voice was hollow and rough in his own ears.  “She doesn’t need rescuing.”

            “That’s a fact.”  Suddenly it was Ben talking to him, Ben idly wandering the room.  “She doesn’t need rescuing, just like I didn’t.  I didn’t need rescuing, I needed destroying—isn’t that right, Rupert?”  Ben turned and looked him over.  “Ooh, that’s a good impression of the thousand-yard stare.  But it doesn’t fool me.  You’re listening.”  As if to prove his point, Rupert’s eyes lifted hopelessly to Ben’s face.

            “So,” Ben said, holding out his palms.  “You got a girlfriend.  She’s got a special connection to the First Evil.  Whatcha gonna do?  Gonna just let her float out there unattended?  Seems to me you can’t really afford to do that.  And after all, it’s not like we’re asking you to do anything drastic.  You don’t have to kill her.  I mean, not unless you want to.  Maybe you do want to.  Nobody’s listening to you, are they?  You’re not getting any further forward.  Maybe you’d like to have somebody’s neck under your hands.  Somebody who’s close enough to the darkness that pinching that life off’ll do some good—”

            “Enough!”  Rupert’s voice cracked.

            “Oh, I don’t think so,” Ben continued.  “I think it’s time that you—and everybody else—understood what you’re good for.  You are the only one smart enough, and dark enough, to do the dirty work.  And they always make you do it, don’t they?  Not by pointing at the mess and watching you dispose of it: just by walking away and assuming it’ll get done.  And let’s face it, you’re not worth much else.  What do you think they’re keeping you around for?  You’re nobody’s hero.”

            Rupert shivered, resistance writ large in every line of his body.

            “Well, it’s up to you.  I mean, the darkness is going to win anyway.  I’m just saying there’s something you could do about it.  You might as well do something instead of waiting here for me to come and get you all.  Sure, you might be doing the wrong thing; but maybe it’s better to do the wrong thing than nothing.  And think about this,” Ben said, pausing at the kitchen doorway.  “Whose hands would you rather have around her throat—yours, or mine?”

            Rupert sat silent long after Ben had gone.  He had resisted, all the way through Ben’s speech.  He could hardly remember, even, what he had said.  But he could feel the poison of it in the tissues of his body.  He would go to sleep, and let it work itself out of his system, and he would be free of the First’s pernicious suggestions.  He, not the First, had won.

 

*

 

            Rupert slept the sleep of the just and weary, for once untroubled by visions or voices or poisonous insinuations.

In the morning, preparing to leave on another trip, he rearranged his flight itinerary to include a stop in England.


	4. Chapter 4

Elisabeth dragged herself out of bed and under a hot shower, determined to keep up the level of tidiness in the house that Brian had established for her, and to _make_ herself do schoolwork.  For the most part this plan succeeded, though it took several cups of tea to move her sluggish brain into quick enough gear for study, and she had the distressing notion that her near miss sorting a red sock out of her whites was an omen for the day’s work.  To her relief the First seemed to be too busy elsewhere to be here to make a comment.

            As if she had summoned it by thinking of it, the First appeared and wandered over to where she sat at her desk.

            “Speak of the devil,” Elisabeth murmured.

            “Hardy har.”  The First-Elisabeth crossed her arms.  “So, I was just thinking:  how would you like to watch Rupert die?”

            Elisabeth channeled a shudder into her compressed lips.  “No thanks.”

            “Oh, come on,” the First said.  “It’d be easy to arrange:  I’ve already got him fixing to come to you.”

            Elisabeth kept her eyes on her book, but she was no longer able to read the words.  She drew a hardy breath.

            “He was amazingly easy to sidetrack,” the First said, lifting casual eyes to the ceiling, “—I mean, considering what a fixation he has for Buffy.”  She cocked her head and looked down at Elisabeth.  “Doesn’t that bother you?”

            “Doesn’t what bother me?” Elisabeth said, in the dull tone she had developed over the weeks.

            “That he cares more about her than he does about you.”

            Elisabeth had had this unworthy thought a few times, but had squelched it on the grounds that a) Buffy (besides being the closest thing to a daughter Rupert had ever had) was the past and future of Rupert’s heritage, and b) Elisabeth herself was constantly urging him to put that heritage first, so if she ever felt left out, who was to blame?

            “It’d bother me far more if he didn’t,” Elisabeth told the First.

            “Oh righhht,” the First answered, “because of your commitment.  To staying uninvolved, to not making waves, to keep from taking up too much space—thin as a shadow—I thought you’d given that up.”

            “Well, I slept with Rupert, if that’s what you mean,” Elisabeth said dryly.

            “And gave him your virgin heart.  It’s so cute.”  Elisabeth’s mirror image clasped its hands under her chin and batted her eyelashes.  “Will it break said virgin heart when I kill him?”

            _Yes_.  “You planning to make the experiment?”

            “Will his heart break when I kill you?” the First mused, thoughtfully.

            “You can only make one experiment or the other,” Elisabeth said, a fine edge growing in her dry voice.  “Courtesy of the arbitrary restrictions of the mortal coil.”

            “_Romeo and Juliet_ doesn’t count?”

            “‘In fair Verona, where we lay our scene—a pair of star-crossed lovers,’” Elisabeth murmured.  “No.  Not really.  Unless you mean to play the part of Friar Lawrence.”

            “Or County Paris.”  The First sighed.  “No, you’re right.  I can only do one experiment.  Won’t you be interested to see which it is, when he comes?”

            And she vanished.

 

*

 

In the silence that followed, Elisabeth began to wish the First would return and start heckling her again.  The back of her neck was prickling and from time to time she shivered hard in her desk chair.  It had not sounded like an empty threat, like the trash talk she had learned to endure from this evil with her voice.  The First was on the move; there were plans; Rupert was coming here.  And when he did, the First would arrange for the death of one or the other of them.

            That Elisabeth suspected the marked one to be herself eased her mind not at all.  Rupert shouldn’t have to watch her die, not on top of everything else.  And if he were to be the one killed....

            Elisabeth ran her hands over shaking arms.  She would have to warn him.  She would have to try to keep him away.

            And that pretty much meant calling Sunnydale. 

            Elisabeth shuddered.

 

*

 

On a large airliner heading ever deeper into night, Rupert sat silent and wakeful, consuming his second little bottle of Red Label, poured (such a nicety) into the plastic cup of ice with which the flight attendant had provided him.  He had shaved properly before leaving; combed his hair, ironed his shirt.

            It wasn’t much of a preparation.

            Quentin Travers was keeping him company again, occupying the seat across the aisle in his phantom fashion.  “This is part of our heritage too, you realize, Giles,” he said.  “Doing the hard thing.  Making the sacrifice.”

            Rupert couldn’t tell him to shut up without drawing the glance of the other passengers.  He settled for curling his lip before draining the last of his scotch.  He rattled the ice and set the cup down with a steady hand.

            “Not too fast now,” Spike drawled from the place Quentin had been.  “Dutch courage is one thing, but you don’t want to Johnny Walker yourself into oblivion.”

            Rupert made no answer.  The sky outside the window grew dark enough to show his reflection.  Rupert turned his head away. 

            He’d rather look at the First than himself.

 

*

 

Elisabeth swallowed dryly and reached for the phone.  She swallowed several more times as she dialed the number she had written down in her address book.  Funny: she would have thought the First would be at her shoulder, cracking wise as she begged Rupert to stay away from her—no.  She wouldn’t, couldn’t, beg.  It would be like putting a big “Eat at Joe’s” sign over her block of flats, veritably inviting Rupert to his fate.  She would be—not subtle either.  Elisabeth had had enough of subtlety, and probably Rupert was equally fed up with it.

  

  1. “Hello?”
  



            “Hello.  Is that—is that Willow?”  Elisabeth shook harder, swallowed again.

            “Yeah.  Um, who’s this?”

            “Sorry, it’s Elisabeth Bowen.”

            “Oh! right.  Um, Giles isn’t here.”

            Elisabeth’s insides sank.  “He’s not there?”

            “No, he—went on another trip.  Should I...tell him you called when he gets back?”

            A faint flutter of panic was rising in Elisabeth now.  “No—I have to get hold of him before he gets back.  Does he have a cellphone?”

            “No,” Willow said.  “He keeps saying he’s going to buy one, but he never does.  I think he likes being mysterious.  You know, just showing up to places and disappearing.”  Her voice held equal tinges of affection and irritation.

            “It’s a damned inconvenient time for him to be mysterious,” Elisabeth said tartly.

            Willow’s reply took on a definite shade of hauteur.  “Well, I’m sorry I can’t really help you get hold of him right now—I don’t even have an itinerary for him—”

            “No,” Elisabeth said, her voice catching, “I’m sorry—I just—I need to talk to him and—  If he calls...if he calls, please try to make him understand that he _can’t come here_.”

            There was a small silence, then Willow said slowly:  “Elisabeth...he didn’t say anything about going to see you.”

            “The First said....”  Oh what a way to earn credibility, she thought, starting a sentence—any sentence—with _The First said_....

            But Willow snapped to attention.  “The First said what?”

            “Said it was going to send him to me.”  _And kill one of us_, she could not bring to voice.  She swallowed once more and tried again.  “He’s in danger if he comes.”

            “Elisabeth,” Willow said quietly, “he’s in danger everywhere he goes.  Does it matter if he comes to you?”

            That fact had not occurred to Elisabeth in just that way, but she was too far gone to heed it.  “The First—” she faltered, “—the First is trying to destroy the story I know—trying to get Rupert off track so he’ll take the wrong path.  I can’t let him do that.  I can’t let him come here—”

            “Wait a minute,” Willow said, “what do you mean, the story you know?  There’s nothing you know.  You came here two years ago.  You don’t know any more than the rest of us.”

            Horror rose in Elisabeth’s chest and swallowed her voice completely.

            The silence grew.

            “You do know more than we do,” Willow said, in the voice of new understanding.  “You saw it all before you came here.  You showed up here knowing all our futures—”  She broke off.

            It came to Elisabeth’s mind just then what the First meant about the completion of losing, of being caught, the exquisite torturous relief of it.  Elisabeth had been shaking as she held the phone to her face, but now her hands grew calm.  She remained silent, letting Willow’s damning words soak into the silence.

            “And Giles knows,” Willow said.

            Elisabeth cleared her throat. “Yes,” she said, “he knows.”

            Elisabeth could hear Willow’s breathing, quick and frantic, over the line.  When Willow spoke, her voice shook.  “Did Tara know?”

            Elisabeth stood up, tears rising in her eyes.  “Yes,” she whispered.  “She didn’t ask what it was, and—”

            Willow’s voice rose.  “And you didn’t do anything.  You saw what was going to happen to her, and you didn’t try to stop it?”

            “I couldn’t,” Elisabeth said.  Oh, what a lame-excuse-sounding answer: and the sound Willow made indicated she thought so too.  Elisabeth drew a hard breath and plunged in to explain.

            “There’s a delicate balance,” she said, holding her voice quiet, “that I couldn’t afford to upset.  And I didn’t know if anything I did would only make things worse—I had to stay away—I have to keep out—please, Willow, tell Rupert—”

            Elisabeth jumped as Willow hung up.

            “Dammit!” she said.  She stared at the phone for a full minute, willing it to reconnect her to Willow so that she could fix it, but it remained silent in her hand.  “Dammit—dammit—dammit.”

            Taking a deep breath, she dialed the number again.

            This time Buffy answered.

            “Buffy,” Elisabeth said, “it’s Elisabeth.  I need to talk to Willow again.  Can you—”

            “No,” Buffy said, and Elisabeth recognized the pleasant danger in her tone, “you don’t.”

            Elisabeth drew a breath and waited.

            Buffy’s voice grew even more pleasant with her next words.  “I don’t know what it is you said to Willow.  But if I was there, I’d put you in whatever the Brits call an emergency room.  Are we clear?”

            Elisabeth let out a sigh.  “I didn’t mean to—”

            “Good,” Buffy said lightly.

            “Listen, Buffy, if you could just tell Rupert—”

            But Buffy had already hung up.

            Elisabeth took the phone away from her ear and stared down at it for the second time.  Then she made a sudden movement, as if to throw it across the room—but she thought better of actually doing it at the last second.  “Shit,” she said, to the empty livingroom.  “_Shit!_”

            She began to pace the livingroom furiously, pausing on one circuit to drop the phone none too gently into its rest.  “Well, the fat’s in the fire now,” she said, and let out a growl.  “So fucking _stupid!_”

            She paced some more, swearing intermittently, expecting the First to appear any moment to get a front-row seat for the show.  But moments passed, then minutes, and the First did not appear.  Perhaps it had decided its work was done.  Elisabeth swore again.

            Yes, that must have been the plan.  Work the pump handle of Elisabeth’s worry about Rupert, then make her do what she had sworn not to, make her call Sunnydale and throw everyone there into chaos.  Well, shit.

            Elisabeth gave up, locked up for the night, and went to bed, where she wept for a long time before falling asleep.

 

*

 

In the morning she half-expected the world to be ended already; but everything was eerily normal, from the sunlight streaming through her bedroom window to the ordinariness of her messy desk.  _You can’t expect it to ruin everything right away_, said the voice in her head.  _A crack in a dam doesn’t work that way_.

            So Elisabeth got to work, suspended in a numb acceptance of what had happened.  The day passed quietly; no one called, except Brian, in the afternoon:  “Listen, ‘Lisbeth,” he told her answering machine, “if you don’t return my call I swear I’m going to break down your door and make sure you’re still alive.”  He gave a little laugh, but she knew he was not joking.  “So when you get this—”  Elisabeth picked up the phone.

            “I’m sorry, Brian.  I really did mean to call you back.”

            “Oh, thank God,” Brian said.  He paused to get his breath back, then asked:  “Are you all right?”

            “I’m fine,” Elisabeth said.  “I got lots of sleep and am now holed up working.”

            There was a little pause, then Brian said, “You _are_ still going to tell me what is going on, right?”

            What could it hurt now?  “Yes,” Elisabeth said.

            “Shall we go out tonight?  Get some drinks and work it out?”

            Elisabeth’s heart sank.  “Oh, I’d love to, Brian, but—now I’ve actually gotten back to work I want to keep on tonight.  Pub lunch tomorrow?”

            He paused only a second.  “Sounds good.  I’ll pick you up tomorrow noonish then.”

            “I look forward to it,” she said, trying for a smile.

            “Right.  Take care, all right?”

            “I will.”

            Elisabeth put the phone down and went back to staring blankly at her open book.

 

*

 

By the time evening rolled around, however, Elisabeth had actually managed to get some work done.  She sat in the quiet, reading slowly, occasionally making notes in a hand that had grown more chaotic since the First had begun its campaign.

            Night fell, and she was still working.  She had not been keeping track of her meals, and it occurred to her around nine that perhaps she should eat something today, but for another ten minutes still did not stir from her desk.  She finally went to the kitchen, made herself a foldover ham sandwich, and ate it at her desk, flipping pages of her notebook.

            A knock sounded at the door, and Elisabeth startled, letting her book fall shut.  Then she shook her head.  The First had made her far too jumpy.  It was probably Brian, disregarding her broad hint that he should leave her alone.  She got up and went to the door.

            Through the peephole she saw that the man standing outside was not Brian at all.  Her heart stopped a moment, then started again at a race.  She opened the door a crack to look at him.

            “Rupert,” she whispered, “you shouldn’t have come.  It’s not safe here.”

            His hands were in the pockets of his coat, his expression broadly laconic.  “It’s not safe anywhere,” he said.

            There seemed no answer to make to that; so Elisabeth stood back from the doorway and let him in.  She shut the door behind him, shaking a little as she turned the lock; then turned to face him where he stood just inside the livingroom.  He had neither taken his hands from his pockets nor changed expression.

            She moved around him into the full light of the room, looking at him.  His eyes moved to her face, his expression unreadable.  “I hoped you wouldn’t come,” Elisabeth said.

            “I have no doubt of that,” he said quietly.

            Something in his manner prompted Elisabeth to ask:  “Did Willow get hold of you, then?”

            He blinked, but no real surprise registered on his face.  “No.  I haven’t spoken with Willow since I left.  Why?”

            “I called her.  I was trying to get hold of you.  To warn you not to come here.”

            “Ah,” he said.  “And you were going to trust to my naivete to heed the warning?”

            She squinted at him.  “Your—sorry?”

            “My naivete,” he said patiently.  “My trusting nature.”

            “Your tr—”  Elisabeth stopped, narrowed her eyes.  “What’s going on?”

            Rupert took his hands from his pockets, and his voice lowered to soft danger.  “Why don’t you tell me.”

            She stood quite still, her eyes on his.  “You didn’t come here to rescue me, did you,” she said at last, her voice as quiet as his.

            The corner of his mouth moved in what was not a smile.  “No.”

            Involuntarily she shifted back a step.  “Then what did you come here for?” she said hardily.

            “To get the information I should have had long ago.”  He matched the step she had taken away from him. 

In that moment Elisabeth decided she would not run: it would only encourage worse things, and anyway where would she run to?  “You won’t have it,” she told him.  “It’s no use to you.”

“Why don’t I be the judge of that.”

“This isn’t about judging,” Elisabeth said, holding her ground though he came a step nearer.  “It’s about balance.  The safety of the world is at stake.”  Even in her ears the words sounded inane, but he didn’t quibble.

“Indeed it is.”  He came a step yet nearer.  “So why don’t you tell me what I want to know.”

“No,” she said.

At this he did smile, raising his eyes briefly to the ceiling: Elisabeth was caught off guard by the gesture, for the next moment she found herself pinned tight against the wall next the kitchen, her left wrist in a merciless grip between them.

She had never envisioned the familiar, pleasant scent of his skin accompanying pain like this, never imagined them this close together and not loving; never thought his eyes meeting hers would mean enmity: and the shock of it left her mute.

He spoke, and she scented scotch on his breath.  “Hmm.  You appear to be touchable....” He moved his thumb, and pain shot through her arm, making her flinch.

She looked up into his face, and as the meaning of his words sank in her fear was temporarily swallowed in a flood of compassion.  “Oh, Rupert,” she whispered.

“Don’t waste your pity on me,” he said evenly.  “I know exactly what I’m doing.”  He gave a small twist to her wrist; she shut her teeth against an open wince.  “Now,” he said:  “tell me what I want to know.”

His voice was soft as a leaf falling in winter, and in his eyes she saw that he spoke the truth:  he had chosen this, and had no intention of hiding it.

_And gave him your virgin heart_, echoed the First mockingly in her mind.

“No,” she said, and bit back her breath at the punishing pain in her wrist.  If he twisted it much further it was going to break.

“Tell me what I want to know,” he repeated softly.

Elisabeth snapped back breathlessly, “Which is, for the record...?”

“If and how the First is defeated.  Who accomplishes it.  If necessary, who survives.”

“I’m telling you that information is no use to you,” Elisabeth said, and received such a vicious twist to her wrist that she heard the bones creak.  Her body responded with a convulsive jerk: he absorbed her impact against him and used his whole body to pin her tighter.  “You’re hurting me,” she croaked.

“That’s the idea.  The sooner you give me my information, the sooner it will stop hurting.”

“Rupert,” she breathed, “you have to listen to me—” Her breath died in her throat as the bones of her wrist cracked against each other once more.

“I’ll listen to you all night long, if it’s what I want to hear.”

Anger prickled hot under her eyelids and constricted her throat.  “We can do this all night long, too,” she said, her voice suddenly strong under the threatening tears.

“Or,” he said, an edge creeping into his voice, “we can take it further.”  She wasn’t sure exactly how he moved, but it increased the radius of her pain tenfold.  She bit back a cry.

“Do you realize what’s happening, I wonder?” he said (she had the faint sense of his sanity unraveling in his soft voice), “while you sit here comfortably in your ivory tower?  Do you know how many people have died horrible deaths?  Or is it always only a story to you?”  He was close enough for his breath to fan her cheek.  “As for me,” he continued, “I’ve had enough of being naive, had enough of waiting and _watching_.  I’ve had my hand on a source of information for two whole years and I swallowed all your lies—”

“They’re not lies,” Elisabeth said.  And was rewarded with pain so great her head went back against the wall.  He waited for her to recover enough to look him in the eye again, and she did, the tears finally spilling over.

“I’ll break it if I have to,” he promised her.  “I’ll do more.  Do you think I won’t?  Do you think I won’t give you the death you should have had two years ago?”

So this was what the First had meant about killing each and destroying both.  What a fool she had been.  The tears spilled hot down her face, and she had to take a moment to gather her voice.

“Then do it,” she said, weeping at last.  “You think I want to live after this?”

She felt him grip her tighter: but his face had become somehow chaotic.  It only made her angrier.  “God damn you,” she choked, “what kind of life do you think I’m living—comfortable?  With the First wearing my face and using my voice—” She coughed at the spume in her throat.  “I will—tell you—nothing.  If you haven’t killed your mercy—then kill me now.”  She lost voice completely, and let go in his hands, so that he was forced to hold her weight up.

Through her tears she could see the shattered look in his eyes; gradually his grip on her faded, and she sank out of his grasp to slide down the wall, weeping.

For a moment there was nothing else; then his hand reached down to her, and his voice scraped like a sheaf of paper— “Elisabeth.”  It was the first time he had used her name.

She batted his hand away and staggered to her feet, ducked around him and stumbled to the bathroom, where she gripped the toilet with one burning arm and one numb one, and lost her ham sandwich.

Her breath tore at her throat.  After an interminable time she got control of her body again, swiped the cords of saliva from her lips, flushed the toilet, rinsed her mouth at the sink, splashed her face.

She returned to the livingroom to find that Rupert had not moved from where he stood.  She gave him a wide berth and went into the kitchen, where she filled herself a glass of water with shaking hands.  She came back into his view with it, taking small sips.

For the first time she saw his face clearly since he had let go of her: he seemed almost to have fainted on his feet.  With a savage mercy she strode forward and seized his coat lapel.  “Sit,” she told him, manhandling him (awkwardly, because of her arm) over to the couch.  He sat.  She put the glass of water into his hands.  “Take this.”  He took it, slowly, from her, and when he was holding it she went and got another glass for herself, which she filled not with water but with brandy.  She returned and took the chair opposite him, perching on its edge as though nothing would ever bear her weight again.

He seemed to have recovered enough to look up at her; she found as she sipped that his eyes were on her face, though still somewhat unfocused.  As she looked back at him, his gaze dropped to her glass.

“None for me, I see,” he whispered.

“Not feeling very hospitable for some reason,” she said.  Her voice sounded very shrill and young in her ears.  “And you seem to have already had some.”

His eyes dropped to his water glass.  “My dutch courage,” he said vaguely.

“Your saving grace,” she said.  The tears threatened to rise again, but she conquered them with very little effort.

“I—”

“If you dare apologize to me—”

He shook his head.  “No.”

There was a long silence.

“You are free to go,” she said at last, “when you feel able.”

He looked up.  “What did the First say to you?”

She gave a bitter laugh she had never thought herself capable of.  “You couldn’t possibly be interested.”

“Please,” he said.

“Everything and nothing,” she said, rising shakily with her drink.  “Day in, day out, my own face, my own voice, my walk.  I wasn’t important enough to kill, then I was vital to the cause.  Then it said it planned to draw you here and kill one of us.  I assumed,” she said, with another little laugh, “it would be me; I assumed it would break you to see me die and your mission would ultimately fail.  I tried to warn you and only ended up betraying to Willow that I knew your future—which didn’t go over well, naturally, since the logical conclusion is that I cold-bloodedly let Tara die.”

“Oh God,” he murmured.

“So I’m rather _non grata_ at the house on Revello now,” she said, turning to him.  “Just so you know.”  She took another sip.  “That’s it in a nutshell.”

He raised his eyes to her, but gave no other response.

“I can only assume the First Evil told you I was in league with the Big Bads,” she said, caustically.  “Fairly easy thing to do, since it has access to my face.”  She took another sip of brandy.  “You should have killed me.”

“I suppose that was the plan,” he said softly.

“There is no plan,” Elisabeth said.  “Is the First here right now?”

Rupert raised his head enough to look around the room, then finally shook his head.

“No one here but us chickens,” she said, with a false cheer that made Rupert look up at her uneasily.  She knew what it was about: she sounded insane even to herself.

“You should have killed me,” she repeated, more to herself than anything.

He made a sudden movement, as if to launch a long explanation.  But in the end he only said:  “I was desperate.”

“But not desperate enough,” she murmured.

Another long silence stretched between them.

“I want you to go now,” Elisabeth said at last.

He stood: the hem of his coat trembled.

“Will you be all right?” he asked.  On his face was a familiar look of ecstatic pain; it made him look older than his years.

“Don’t concern yourself,” Elisabeth said.  “Go and do your work.”

“My work,” he repeated, bitterly.

“Which,” she said, “you can do just as well without my information.  If you ever decide to believe me.”

“Elisabeth....”

She lowered her eyes to her glass, and swirled the amber liquid so that it caught the light.  “Get out,” she said, very quietly.

He set down his glass.  She stood there, keeping her eyes on the play of light in the brandy, until she heard the door open and just as quietly close.  Then she set down her brandy glass and lowered herself into the armchair, where she remained till morning, watching the bruises come in on her arms.


	5. Chapter 5

When enough daylight showed in her livingroom to compete with the lamps she had left on through the night, Elisabeth got up and took her brandy and Rupert’s water glass to the kitchen, where she washed them thoroughly and set them to drain.  Her left wrist hurt to turn; she supposed it must be a sprain, and decided she would go out and purchase an Ace bandage at the chemist’s after she’d had her lunch with Brian.  In the meantime, she wondered, what did one do for a sprain?  Heat pack?  Cold pack?  At the very least, it was definitely a long-sleeve day.

            She showered and dressed, moving her left arm sparingly.  There was plenty of work to do, and since the First seemed to have decided it was done with her, there was no reason not to go on as if the world were not ending.  How odd, that she should be so strong:  her mind and body were light as a blown egg, and just as empty.

            Perhaps she should eat something, she thought.

 

*

 

On another airplane Rupert reclined in his seat, staring blankly ahead.  He had seen a brief resurgence of emotion a few hours ago as he waited for his plane to arrive: a twist of deep grief followed by a backlash of defensive anger; then both together had sunk in the murk of his psyche, and he had felt nothing since.

            Today, his companion was the Mayor.

            “Tsk—looks like it didn’t turn out the way you planned after all.  Oh, well! better luck next time.  Maybe your real enemy won’t have that pesky moral high ground for you to contend with.”  The Mayor shook his head.  “Always happens when you mix love and work.  Things get mixed up, and then you get a lonnng string of third parties lining up to play the game.  It’s just not pretty.”

            Rupert said nothing.

            “Guess you’re a bit tired today,” the Mayor said.  “Well, at least you accomplished something.  You opened that little gate of No Turning Back and marched right on through.”  He chopped a flat hand straight ahead of his face.  “I’m proud of you.  At least you have that; I mean, I don’t see _her_ ever coming to understand your sacrifice.”

            Rupert turned his head slightly to the side but did not quite look at the First.

            “You know who I mean.  That other Slayer, what’s-her-name.”

            “Buffy,” Rupert said softly.

            “Yes, that’s it!  I always forget.  No, I don’t think Buffy’ll understand your level of personal sacrifice.  Any time she sacrifices something it’s all center stage and no one can miss it, but you?  You just quietly let it go, and maybe occasionally one or two people’ll notice.  That girlfriend of yours, now—I think she has your number.  Not that that matters anymore, eh?  Ahh well, easy come, easy go.  Who needs a girlfriend when it’s the end of the world?”  The Mayor chuckled.

            Rupert made no answer.

 

*

 

Accordingly at “noonish” Brian appeared at Elisabeth’s front door to find her dressed, but not ready.  “I’ve got to finish copying this out, then I’ll be ready to go,” she said, ushering him in.  She moved too quickly for Brian to comment, if he had one, on the circles under her eyes; a small touch of makeup had covered the worst of her haggardness, but could not quite disguise the eyes and the paleness of her skin.  She knew she didn’t look like someone who was supposed to be on the mend.

            Brian followed her over to her desk and watched her as she reassembled a sheaf of papers and finished the list she had made of titles to get from the library when she had time.  “Hand me that notebook over there,” she said, pointing across them both to the table next the desk.  He moved briefly to comply, but the next moment she found he had grabbed her left hand and was turning it over to expose the large bruise peeping from beneath the sleeve.  “What’s this?”  His voice was quiet but sharp.

            She let out a great sigh as he pushed up her sleeve to reveal the whole show—the black fingerprints Rupert had left on her pale flesh, unmistakable as an injury done with malice aforethought.

            For a long moment all he did was stare dumbly at her arm.  Then he raised wide eyes to her face.  “What is this?” he repeated.

            She pulled her arm free of his grasp.  “Casualties of war,” she said shortly, and turned back to face the desk.

            He took her by the shoulders and made her face him.  “Enough,” he said.  “Don’t give me that cock-and-bull war-against-evil stuff again.  This,” he said, taking up her wrist again and holding it up between them, “wasn’t done by some phantom.”

            She looked down at her own injuries.  “No,” she said.  Her face felt leaden.

            “Who did this to you?”

            “It isn’t that simple,” she said, pulling free from him again.  “It was all engineered by the First Evil—”

            “The First Evil?  The wife of the President of the United States?”

            Trust Brian to zing her with a sarcastic joke at a time like this.  Elisabeth rolled her eyes.  “That’s the First Lady.  I’m talking about the First Evil, who’s a lot older than Tipper Gore, for one thing—”

            “If at some point you decide to tell me who did this to you, let me know, will you?”

            She brushed her hair out of her eyes and glared at him.  He glared back.  “I am trying,” she said over the ache beneath her tongue, “to tell you what is happening.  Rupert....”  She paused to swallow, and to her dismay Brian read perfectly the way her eyes skittered from his face to her wrist and away.

            “_Rupert_ did this?”

            She was half-ready to make the headshake and face of denial, but couldn’t even finish the gesture.

            “Rupert,” he said, in a soft hiss.  “Where is he?”

            “Brian—”

            He had almost started away from her, as if to take to the streets and track him down, but at her voice he turned.  “No really.  Where is he, Elisabeth?  The bastard can’t be far.”

            “He’s probably out of the country by now,” Elisabeth said faintly.  “Brian—just hang on a moment—”

            “Elisabeth!  You can’t let him get away with this.”

            “He’s not getting away with it.”  Her hard voice brought Brian to attention.  “I assure you, he’s getting all he deserves and more.  Are you going to hear what happened, or not?”

            Brian looked as though he found it highly doubtful that Rupert was being properly chastised, but he folded his arms and waited.

            Elisabeth wished he’d stop looking so truculent before she began, but decided there was no point waiting.  “The First Evil is looking for a way to destroy the story I know.  I told you about that story; you remember?”

            Brian nodded.  But a new expression had crept into his eyes: not dubiety exactly, just—perhaps—a new willingness to interpret what Elisabeth said with his own caution.  Elisabeth sighed inwardly.  Perhaps there was something suggestive of mania in her bearing; if so, there was nothing she could do about it now, and—this frightened her—there was relatively little she could do if Brian determined to take matters into his own hands.  She proceeded cautiously.

            “Well, there are two things you need to know about the First,” she said.  “One is, it can’t touch anything; it has to act through agents.  Two is, it can only appear as people who have died.”  It seemed odd to her now that she had not explained this to Brian before; suppose the First had attacked him?  It was bad enough dealing with it when you understood what it was.  “And I,” she said, “have died temporarily.”

            Brian was not a stupid man.  “So it’s been appearing to you.  As yourself.”

            “Yes.”  Elisabeth suppressed a shiver.

            “And nobody else can see it.”

            “Yes.  And,” she sighed, “from what Rupert said—”

            “It’s been appearing to him as you as well.”  Brian’s face darkened.  “You know, if this evil thing appeared to me as someone I loved, my natural reaction would be to worry that they’d died, not to—”

            “I expect he probably did, at first,” Elisabeth said, cutting him off quietly.  “But there’s this thing about the First...the subtlest of all the beasts in the garden.  And Rupert has a lot of dead people in his life.  I imagine they all ganged up on him and convinced him to—”

            “To what, Elisabeth?  Show up here and abuse you?”  Brian paused, horror growing in his face.  “What—Elisabeth—what exactly...did he do?”

            Elisabeth stared, motionless, at the surface of her cluttered desk.  “He tried to force me to tell him the rest of the story.  He had been made desperate, he believed that the First couldn’t be defeated without the information I could give him...But he couldn’t quite go through with it.”

            Brian said harshly, “It looks like he got pretty far before he stopped.”

            Elisabeth’s knees were shaking.  Until the moment she had done it, she had not anticipated the horrible shame of confessing to her friend what had been done to her.  Now that it was done, and the defiling wave of shame had passed through her, she felt weak in its wake.  And for a moment she carried a blinding, burning hatred against Rupert for making her a victim all over again.

            Brian was talking.  “...extradition treaty, depending on where he is—”

            Elisabeth looked up.  “—Extradition?  What....Are you out of your mind?”

            Brian merely stared at her without even bothering to point out the irony of her question.

            “This is so far beyond civil or criminal law—it’s—there’s not even a point, Brian.  Besides, if I wanted to destroy the story, there’s one foolproof way of doing it.”

            “The story be damned,” Brian said.  The Oxford veneer was wearing off his native Mancunian.  “You can’t let him get away with it.”

            “I told you,” Elisabeth said, “he’s not getting away with it.”

            “Well, it looks a damned lot like it from here.”

            “You don’t understand what the First is doing to him—to us—”

            “Elisabeth!  God, you still think you’re an ‘us’?  After what he did?”

            “That’s not what I meant.  Hold your voice down.”  Elisabeth gathered herself as best she could and gave him a level stare.  “You have to understand how irrelevant the normal authorities are for this kind of thing.  I have to wait this war out, but other people are fighting, and dying.  Horribly.  And if the First Evil is not defeated, then it’ll just keep happening, on an even bigger scale.  If the First is defeated, and Rupert survives, then we’ll talk retribution.  Until then I’m keeping my head down.”

            “Playing his game, is what you’re doing.”

            Elisabeth reddened.  “I’m not playing anyone’s game, Brian.”

            His hands had balled into fists.  Elisabeth thought of the history he’d given her, of his years holding his own in backlot fights, but his stance seemed ineffectual compared to Rupert’s lithe malignance.  For some reason she found herself unaccountably furious at Brian.  “I’m not playing anyone’s game,” she repeated, glaring.

            “Oh no?  It’s not playing their game to lie down and take it, like you did with those other Watchers?”

            “That—was—different,” Elisabeth said, gripping her desk chair so that her wrist hurt.  “And besides, I won that little skirmish.”

            “Skirmish?  That’s what you call it.  And they’re still walking around free men to this day.”

            “Well, not really,” Elisabeth said.  “The First exterminated them.”

            “Looks like he missed one.”

            She drew in a sharp breath.  If Brian had been close enough she’d have slapped him, and he knew it.

            Her voice came low and deadly.  “You don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

            Now Brian was flushing too.  “Oh yeah?  Well, explain to me the difference, Elisabeth.  Explain to me—” he pointed off to the side, as if in the direction of the Council— “what’s different about Watchers abducting and interrogating you, and one Watcher, who’s supposed to love you, showing up and betraying you and leaving bruises all over you.”

            It was all the worse that he had a point.  “I’m not playing anyone’s game,” she said for the third time, carefully holding down her voice to keep it from shaking.  “I’m waiting out the war.”

            Brian tossed his head.  “So you’re willing to put up with any sort of injustice just because there’s a spiritual war on?”

            “Not every injustice,” Elisabeth said coolly.

            Brian went very still.  There was a silence, then he spoke, his inflections impeccably Oxford once more:  “I see.  So what it boils down to is, I’m not good enough to be in your little evil-fighting club.  Or, I should say, not ruthless enough.”

            Elisabeth blanched.  “Brian—that’s not—”

            “You know,” Brian said, “I’m really not feeling very hungry.  I think I’ll go home.  I have some marking to do.”  He turned, and strode deliberately to her door.

            “Brian,” she said, faintly, but she couldn’t manage any stronger protest.

            At her door he turned, anger and sympathy clearly warring in his face.  “Call me,” he said, “if I can be of any use.”  The door closed sharply behind him.

            “You bastard,” Elisabeth said to the closed door.  She sat down shakily in her desk chair, buried her head in her bruised arms on the desk, and cried.

 

*

 

The last time Rupert had returned to the house on Revello, he had thought he couldn’t possibly dread it more.  Now, taking the front steps wearily one at a time, he decided not to think that anymore.  It could always get worse.

            They were glad to see him alive, of course; but they were also conserving their energy, as if to be too glad to see him might leave them too weak to face the next buffeting wave of battle.  Also, as Xander said, being too happy might jinx it.  Rupert ducked away from Xander’s thoughtful stare and went to talk with Buffy.

            He expected Buffy to say something about Elisabeth, either caustic or probing; but Buffy made no mention of Elisabeth whatsoever, and indeed seemed to have forgotten she existed.  Which, under the circumstances, was quite all right with him.

            He had just begun to think he could forget all about what had happened and throw himself back into the work here, when Willow caught him as he slipped down the corridor to the bathroom.  One look at her big eyes and he knew he was caught.

            “Did you go and see Elisabeth?” she asked him quietly, beneath the current of hubbub throughout the house.

            The last thing Rupert wanted was to endure a sub-rosa interrogation from Willow in the corridor.  “Yes,” he said shortly.  “For about ten minutes.  Willow, if you could excuse me....”

            He tried to move around her, but she did not budge.  “You’re not excused,” she said, folding her arms.  Rupert saw clearly the stubbornness on her face, felt with his sixth sense the wall radiating from her.  Well, he could be stubborn, too.  He glared down at her.

            “She called here, you know.”

            “Yes,” he said quietly, “I know.”

            “I didn’t tell Buffy,” Willow said, meeting his eyes.  “I was waiting for you to do it.”

            “I don’t have anything to tell,” Rupert said.

            “But you went and saw her....”

            Rupert’s gaze skittered away from hers.  “Her information’s no use to us,” he said flatly.

            He tried again to push past her, but her voice rose, stopping him.  “How can you say that?  Giles—she knows our whole story.  Surely there’s something in what she told you—if she told you....”

            “No,” Rupert said harshly.  “Her information’s no use to us.  Leave it,” he said, and successfully broke past her and took refuge in the bathroom, shutting the door with a snap and leaving Willow staring after him.

 

*

 

The next few days passed without much event for Elisabeth.  She left only to buy a few groceries and a bandage for her sprained wrist.  The sun came up and the sun went down, and she read, worked, dozed in her chair.  Realities merged for her, dreams flashed across the screen of her mind and mixed with her waking moments, so that when the phone rang one afternoon she had no idea what day it was, or what she was supposed to be doing.

            It was one of her fellow students.  “Good God, Elisabeth, where have you been?” she said.  “Nobody’s seen hide or hair of you all week.”

            “Sorry,” Elisabeth said thickly.

            “You’ve fallen asleep over your books again, haven’t you?  Well, you’ve missed yesterday’s study session.  There’s one tomorrow if you want to come to that.”

            “Right,” Elisabeth said.  She grabbed her calendar and worked out what day it was, then got off the phone and stared glassily at her messy desk.  Tomorrow.  She’d get some sleep and go to the study session tomorrow, though what she was meant to be studying she couldn’t even remember.  She highly doubted she’d be worth anything when she did go..._worth anything_..._no—don’t fall asleep—it’s not safe—must hold on_—

 

*

 

Rupert hid himself away in a dark room, pretending to work and shooing everyone away.  Even Dawn tried to talk to him and ended up coming out with a wide-eyed grimace.  For once the First seemed to have decided to leave him alone, but Rupert was not fooled:  the First would return to the attack as soon as it judged Rupert to be letting down his guard.

            He knew Willow was there before he looked up and saw her.  He could feel her mind picking lightly at the edges of his battened-down consciousness, patiently, as how one should remove a stubborn price tag from a new purchase.  “Giles,” she said quietly.

            He sighed in answer, and she came fully into the room.

            “Tell me what happened,” she said.

            He shut his notebook abruptly and made as if to get up and leave, but he was just so damned tired.  “I don’t—” he said— “it’s not—”

            “Giles.  Just tell me,” Willow said.

            There was no way to tell her: and yet he heard his own voice speaking, giving Willow everything in a flat, soft monotone:  “I tried to force the information out of her.  I only succeeded in hurting her.  The First has driven her half-mad with visions of herself.  She has nothing she can tell us.  The story is changing.”

            There was a long silence.  Then Willow asked, “For the better or for the worse?”

            Rupert waited for the space of a few breaths, then gave his answer, light with despair. 

            “I don’t know,” he said.

 

*

 

After a very hot shower and a cup of turbo-swill, Elisabeth thought she might just make the study session intact.  Her mind had turned into a palimpsest that was constantly erasing and rewriting itself, but that she could probably ignore enough to speak to others with a reasonable degree of coherence.  She packed her satchel carefully, counting things over under her breath.  Notebook—library books—disks—notepad—pens.  All there.  She slung it over her shoulder and left the flat without a backward look.

            It had never seemed such a long walk to Magdalen Bridge before.  Elisabeth was fairly sure she was on the right road—there were the landmarks she saw almost every day—but reality may have shifted for her, may have decided to buck her off, like the street in G.K. Chesterton’s story.  “I’m sorry,” she told the Iffley Road.  “I didn’t mean to take you for granted.”  A passerby looked askance at her, but Elisabeth decided not to pay him any mind.

            The Bridge, at last.  Elisabeth crossed with the sense of escape, breathed deep, and headed toward the College.  There, the porter’s lodge.  Sims the porter waved at her from the desk—a much huger distance than she had ever thought—and she waved back across the illimitable space with a wan smile.

            She went out into the quad and had gone halfway across before she heard her name:  “Elisabeth...Elisabeth!  Over here!”

            She turned, and turned again before she finally saw her friend coming towards her.  “There you are.  Good God.  You look awful.  Are you sure you’re all right?”

            “I’m fine,” she heard herself say.

            Her friend was frowning at her with far too much scrutiny.  “You don’t look fine.”

            “I am fine, really,” she said.  “Let’s go.”  And she headed off across the quad without waiting to see if her friend was coming.  Though she could not at all remember where it was she was meant to be going.  Damn!  Was that her face again, like that day across Radcliffe Camera?  No, no—her imagination.  Her friend was shouting after her, and what was the reason for that?  Nothing particularly was happening, except perhaps the ground was a little closer than she was used to seeing it—it was approaching—oh, right, she was falling for some reason.  And now she had collapsed and now it was going to take over—oh, it was going to take over and she couldn’t stop it—

 

*

 

Everything went very gray for a while, and she felt herself borne up and carried.  It was rather like floating in water, but perhaps not quite like that because in her ears was the fuzzing pressure you feel when you’re _under_ the water, not floating in it, and there was an echoing feeling in her body in response, filling every tissue, and she used to know what it meant—oh, yes, now she remembered—fear, it was fear she was feeling but she had been so saturated with it for so long that it didn’t matter any more—except it did matter, because how on earth was she going to finish term like this?—there was a voice in her ears, muttering and whimpering, and it was that voice she had learned to hate so much, and she wished she could stop it but it kept on....

            “Steady,” said a doctor’s voice, and the scene had changed to one with people in white coats and fluorescent lights and curtains and narrow beds.  _The insane asylum, perhaps_?  Elisabeth heard someone asking.  _No, just the infirmary_, said a nurse, and then, _you’re going to be all right—it’s exhaustion.  Happens every year_.

            _The First comes every year_? Elisabeth heard her hated voice asking.

            But she got no answer to this.

            The fuzzy pressured sound was in her head and it wouldn’t stop.  She wasn’t floating really, she was drowning, and all these busy people around her were busy but not doing anything, not even really looking at her and it was exactly like that damned Stevie Smith poem—

            “I can’t _stand_ Stevie Smith,” she said strongly.

            “Yeah,” said a voice, quavering, “she’s such a bitch.”

            Brian.  Brian looking her in the face, his eyes wide and frantic but focused.  “But don’t worry,” he went on, “you’re not drowning.  I’m here.  We’re not going to let you drown.”  His hands were touching her, one holding her hand and the other stroking back her hair.  Elisabeth choked into dry sobs.

            “Brian,” she mewled, “I’m so sorry.  I’m sorry I didn’t think you were good enough for my evil-fighting club—”

            “No, no.  Dammit, don’t say that.  I’ve been regretting it ever since I said it.  I was an ass to you and then I left you to—”

            “No,” she said, “I should have told you before.”

            The faintest of smiles quirked his lips.  “Well, I won’t argue with that,” he said, and they laughed together.  “But you’re taken care of now,” he said.  “You’re not to worry.”

            “I’ll never finish term like this.”

            He stroked her hair.  “Don’t worry about that now.  I’m taking care of it.  Okay?”

            “Okay.”

            Next to Brian she saw a doctor with a syringe.  “What’s that?” she asked, fearfully.

            “It’s just a sedative,” Brian soothed her.  “It’ll help you sleep.”

            “No—” she said, “—no, I can’t—”

            “Yes you can,” he said, touching her forehead softly.  “I’ll be right here the entire time.  Just keep your eyes on me, right?”

            She gathered her courage, nodded.  She kept her eyes on Brian and felt the small sharp pinch of the needle in the soft hollow of her arm.  Grayness flowed in, and she shut her eyes, and there came the familiar moment—_All you have to do is let go_—and she let go, and sank into an erasing darkness.


	6. Chapter 6

The doctor pulled Brian aside quietly, after the moan had stilled in Elisabeth’s throat.

            “Do you know what those—” he gestured at the fading green bruises on her arm— “are all about?”

            Brian cast his eyes down.  “I tried to get her to talk about it,” he muttered, “but she wasn’t very forthcoming.”

            “Do you think she’s being abused?”

            Did he _think_ she was being abused?  “I think,” Brian said carefully, “that it was a single incident.  But I don’t know for sure.”

            He could feel the doctor staring a hole in him.  “Mr—”

            “Whitaker—,” Brian supplied—

            “—this could be indicative of something very serious.  She’s clearly suffered a severe emotional trauma in addition to exhaustion and physical vitiation.  It could be a matter for the police.  If you’re protecting someone—”

            Brian lifted his head.  “The only person I want to protect is my friend,” he said.

            “Then if you know—”

            This was his big opportunity.  This was what he’d been waiting for, visualizing, in hopes of making Rupert Giles pay for what he’d done.  He opened his mouth.

            “No,” he said feebly, after a moment’s silence.  “She...never told me.”

            “She hasn’t a...boyfriend, or anything of that sort?”

            Brian’s eyes were back on Elisabeth’s troubled sleeping face.  “No,” he heard himself say.  “She hasn’t anyone.  She’s alone.”

            There was a silence; then the doctor let out a sigh.  “Well, I’ll start the inquiries.  But I doubt it’ll come to anything.”

            “She won’t like that,” Brian said suddenly, as the doctor turned away.  He turned again and gave Brian a measuring look.  “But you have my blessing for it.”

            The doctor seemed to understand the look Brian was giving him.  “Right,” he said, and disappeared, leaving Brian to his vigil at Elisabeth’s bedside.

 

*

 

He kept at his work.  He worked; slept; laughed (a brittle ghost of his old laugh); presented an eggshell semblance of who he used to be.  It almost didn’t seem to matter that he had died off, all of him except for faint flashes of anger—self-pity, and battle madness—sometimes appropriate to the occasion, sometimes not.

            The First seemed to be leaving him alone for the most part, except for the nights when as Buffy it wandered silently around the house, looking over Rupert’s sleeping charges with eyes hardly more bright and hard than those of the real Buffy.  Rupert was far beyond wondering what the First was doing to Buffy in private.  It never even occurred to him anymore.  The two pairs of eyes looked nearly the same: and this, with his deadened vision, was all Rupert could see.

            They weren’t going to win this one.  The marrow of hope that he had never quite lost within him had now dried to a powder and blown away.  He had nothing to offer Buffy in this fight; death, when it came, would be—oh, probably not a relief—wasn’t there a special hell for such as he?  Except some part of him still protested that he didn’t deserve it.  It was a conundrum he was too tired to solve.

            It was time to cut his losses, though where those losses lay he could only guess.

            It was almost a relief when Robin Wood singled him out for a conversation.

 

*

 

Elisabeth came out of the sedative quickly, bounced into panicked wakefulness within three blinks, and had to be put out again.

            One of the sisters brought Brian a cup of coffee, which he accepted gratefully.  He had no idea what time it was.

            “Her priest is coming,” the sister said.  “Called just now, found out where she was.”

            “Oh?” Brian uttered, startled.  He had forgotten that Elisabeth even went to church.  Brian held no sanguine hopes of the priest, whoever he was, being able to do anything useful for Elisabeth.  Perhaps, Brian thought, he should duck out for a moment and avoid getting prayed over as well.

            “Yeah,” said the sister, “Mother Anne comes here every now and then to visit people.  She found out about Miss Bowen by accident, I think.  So she’s coming over.”

            “Like, now?” Brian said, feeling a faint stir of panic.

            “Yeah, now,” said the sister.  “Oh! they’re calling me.”

            Brian twisted in his chair, mouth open to make some sort of protest, but it was useless, the sister was gone.  _He_ was useless, just sitting here: why should he begrudge an old lady in a collar saying a few words over Elisabeth’s sleeping form?

 

*

 

The woman who strode into the room and to Elisabeth’s bedside could hardly have been less like Brian’s idea of what her priest would look like.  In fact, for the five seconds before he caught sight of the collar, Brian wondered what the hell this person was doing in his friend’s room.  “Excuse me—” he said indignantly, just as he caught sight of the round of white peeping over her navy windbreaker.  “—oh.”

            “Yes?”  The woman turned and pinned him with grey eyes.  She was quite young, probably no older than himself, with wayward short ash-blond hair.  Her jaw was a little too strong, her mouth a little too wide and thin, for beauty.

            Brian stood up, feeling vaguely as though he ought to be showing some mark of respect.  “You—you’re—”

            “Anne Langland; vicar at St. John’s.  Elisabeth is one of my parishioners.  And you are?”

            Under her steady commanding gaze Brian swallowed.  It seemed to matter not in the least that he was several inches taller.  “Brian Whitaker,” he stammered.

            Recognition lifted the priest’s frown.  “Ah.”

            Brian felt a stirring of panic.  “Elisabeth mentioned me to you?...Listen, about those women...I didn’t really—” Mother Anne raised a humorous eyebrow, and Brian trailed off:  “...and she never...mentioned...the women to you, did she.”

            “No,” the priest said.  “She said you were her best friend.”

            Brian had now gone completely mute.  He nodded.

            Mother Anne sighed.  “I’m glad you’re here.”  She turned to look down at her parishioner’s closed face.  “What are they saying about her?”

            Brian shoveled his brains together fast.  “Well, they’ve been keeping her on sedatives so she stays asleep.  I think they mean to discharge her once she’s slept a decent stretch.”

            Anne shook her head.  “That’s no good.  She needs to be properly looked after.”  She looked up at Brian’s face.  “Do you—?”

            Brian winced.  “I’d planned to take her in, but—all I have’s a bedsitter, you see, and it’s not all that quiet....”

            The priest returned her gaze to Elisabeth’s face, frowning.  “It’d better be the vicarage for her, then.  There’s plenty of room.  If you wouldn’t mind helping to look after her—”

            “Of course,” Brian said, without waiting for her to finish.

            “She looks awful,” Anne said, compressing her lips.  “I should have got into touch with her sooner.  I knew something was up, but—well, there’s no use crying over spilt milk.”  Brian could see that the vicar’s eyes were studying the bruises on Elisabeth’s I.V. arm, but beyond a thoughtful look she made no comment.  Instead she produced a small, round brass case from the pocket of her windbreaker and quietly anointed her charge’s forehead, murmuring softly.  As Brian watched, his eyes stung for a moment.

            Anne finished and turned to see him watching silently.  “Usually,” she said, “I ask permission of the patient first.  But I feel sure Elisabeth would—”

            Brian nodded definitely.

            “Listen,” she said, “perhaps we should exchange telephone numbers, so that when Elisabeth is discharged—”

            “We can,” Brian shrugged, “but I’ll be here.”

            The priest gave him a long look.  “Right then.  I’ll be about making the arrangements.  I’ll see you soon.”  She turned and made to leave, but at the door she paused.  “It’s a pity we couldn’t have met under pleasanter circumstances,” she said, with a small smile.  Brian gave a small nod—under pleasanter circumstances he’d have avoided a meeting with a priest at all costs—but if Anne knew it, her expression did not betray it.

            With a final nod the priest disappeared, and Brian sat down heavily in the chair he’d occupied almost since Elisabeth arrived in the infirmary.

            At last he was not alone.

 

*

 

Unconsciousness was blessing to her, but getting there was terrifying.  She woke up once, and then again, and then a third time, to an instant seizure of panic: and her little Stevie Smith drowning analogy grew more and more apt each time they stuck her with the needle and brought the greyness curtaining down.  Brian’s blue sweater was a dark smudge among all the white coats and pastel scrubs; he was the only constant, so much so that she wasn’t quite sure if he was really there, if perhaps instead all the flux around him was the true index of who and where she really was.  _It’s like that one episode_, she thought distractedly, _where Buffy gets poisoned by the demon and thinks she’s been insane all the time she thought she was the Slayer_—

            Damn it.  Why did she have to keep mediating her whole damn life through that television show?  It solved nothing, it made interpretation of events impossible—

            Somebody was asking for Rupert, and this too was an annoyance.

            Brian leaned close.  “Don’t worry,” he said, as if from across a great distance.  “You’re safe.  You’re all right.”

            “Tell Rupert—”

            But she had forgotten what it was she wanted to tell Rupert, if he really existed: and then the darkness closed over her again.

 

*

 

Dean Blakely came to visit, and had a whispered conversation with Brian in the corridor.  It was possible Elisabeth could get a leave of absence for illness, and if she recovered, return either in the summer or next Michaelmas to make up the work she had missed.  But it didn’t solve the problem of funding; they had safety nets for her well-being, but currently there were neither free monies nor a volunteer to underwrite the cost of her scholarship.

            “I’ll take care of it,” Brian said.  “Give me the information and I’ll get back to you.”

            Dean Blakely’s crow’s-feet crinkled sadly.  “I’m afraid it’d be beyond a don’s salary, Mr Whitaker,” he said.

            “I’ll take care of it,” Brian said stolidly.

            The Dean grasped Brian’s shoulder for a brief moment.  “Give Miss Bowen my best wishes when she’s awake,” he said.

            Brian nodded.

 

*

 

When they judged she had slept enough hours, they let her wake up of her own accord: and she did, slowly, her eyes dull and distracted.  She kept down a few sips of water, then part of an orange ice.  Her eyes followed the doctor’s penlight, and she responded to her name.  It was enough for the infirmary to send her home to adequate care.  Brian went to bring his car round, and Anne stayed to help Elisabeth dress.

            They brought a wheelchair for Elisabeth, but she insisted instead on clinging unsteadily to Anne’s arm and mincing slowly down the corridor to the doors.

            At the vicarage Brian helped bring Elisabeth into the house and was all set to tuck her into the bed Anne had made up for her when Anne intervened and insisted he go home and get a shower and shave, a nap, and some fresh clothes for himself.  “You might stop by Elisabeth’s flat and pick up some of her things when you’ve done,” Anne said.  “And I don’t want to see you for another six hours at least.”

            Brian did as he was told.

 

*

 

The next morning, eight hours after the vicar had sent him home, Brian drove to Elisabeth’s flat, blinking the sleep out of his eyes.  He let himself in with the key Elisabeth had numbly given him and, after checking that everything in the flat was in order, went to pack her a bag.

            On his way back out he paused at her desk.  An idea had germinated slowly in his mind while sleeping, and he had waked from a dead sleep with the alarm ringing in his ears and the idea growing just under the edge of his consciousness.

            Now he pawed lightly through her papers, delicately moving notes and lists and index cards and sticky notes, until he found what he was looking for.

            _Tell Rupert_, she had said.

            “No problem, sweetie,” he said aloud.

            He flipped open her address book and began searching through it, carefully.  Rupert Giles’s name was in it, but the address listed was in Bath, and Elisabeth had said he was on his way out of the country.  Presumably he’d be Stateside by now, unless he was dead.  Brian dearly hoped the bastard wasn’t dead.

            He paged through more names, looking them over carefully.  Some, like Olivia, he knew; some he did not.  At last he found an address in Sunnydale, CA.  Paydirt.  The name was Summers.

            He glanced briefly at his watch, gauging the—what? six-hour? eight-hour?—time difference, and decided there was no time like the present.  Wake the old git up, serve him right.

            He dialed (making a mental note to arrange to pay Elisabeth’s phone and utility bills), and waited while the connection was made.

            Finally, a flat, wary male voice.  “Hello?”

            “Rupert Giles, please,” Brian said coolly.

            The voice cleared its throat.  “Speaking.”

            “Is that Mr Giles, then?” Brian said.  (He couldn’t believe he was being this polite.)

            “Yes,” came the impatient reply.

            Time to lower the boom.  See if this bastard cared anything about her.

            “This is Brian Whitaker,” he said, letting the temperature of his voice drop as many degrees as it pleased him.  “I’m calling to let you know that Elisabeth Bowen has collapsed and is now under medical care.  They’re calling it stress compounded by exhaustion and possibly an unidentified physical attack.  They’ve put forward inquiries about that last, but I doubt anything’ll come of it.”

            Brian’s voice went quite bitter on the last phrase.  He stopped, and waited for the other man to respond.  It took several seconds, but finally Rupert said, “I see,” in a colorless voice.

            Brian cleared his throat and schooled the emotion carefully out of his voice.  “Everyone among her friends is doing their utmost for her, but I’m told unless someone underwrites her scholarship she may well lose her place at Oxford.”

            In the same colorless voice, the other man responded:  “As you may or may not have been told, the world might be ended before that becomes an issue.”

            Brian said:  “I don’t care if it ends at teatime.  You’re the one who’s going to provide the funding.  That is, if you give a shit about her at all.”  He cleared his throat again, more to still his shaking than anything else.

            Rupert’s silence, following this bolt, was the longest yet.  Finally he answered, with what Brian thought was a hateful catlike coolness:  “I doubt Elisabeth would be willing to accept that kind of help from me.”

            “That’s why you’re going to do it anonymously.”  Brian dug in his pocket, still shaking violently, and pulled out the information Dean Blakely had left on his answerphone.  “I’m going to give you Dean Blakely’s number, and the number of the Bursar, and the amount required, and let you call them and make the arrangements.  I don’t care what you call it, call it the Punch and Judy Endowment, call it the bloody Red Tea Cozy Endowment.  Just get it done.  Today.”

            After another interminable silence, Rupert said:  “Very well.  Let me get a pen.”

            Brian waited until Rupert gave him the go-ahead, then read out the numbers to him in a voice upon which he congratulated himself as being quite light and free of strain.

            “Thank you,” Rupert said finally.  “I’ll make the arrangements.”

            “Good,” Brian said.  “Well, good luck with that end-of-the-world thing.”

            “Thank you,” Rupert said dryly.

            “And one more thing.”

            “Yes?”

            “Don’t ever come near her again.”  Brian pressed the button to end the call before Rupert could respond.  He braced his hands on the desk and took several minutes to breathe himself back into equilibrium before taking up Elisabeth’s bag and leaving her flat.

            He paused in the car for just a moment, to savor what he’d done.  He’d never be able to tell Elisabeth, of course—that is, if they survived whatever apocalypse was coming and Elisabeth got her faculties back and returned to her coursework.  She had a best-case scenario; Rupert had found out what his act had done to her; and he, Brian, had been the one to tell him.

            At last, Brian thought as he put the car in gear: something had been accomplished.


	7. Chapter 7

“I know you’re here,” Elisabeth said quietly to the empty bedroom.  “Even if I can’t see you.”

            She didn’t know what had become of Anne or Brian; they were shadows who took turns sitting at her bedside, murmuring, bringing cups of tea to herself and one another, giving Elisabeth her medicine.  Their presence ought to have been a comfort, but in a way they only seemed to make the miasma of pain and confusion brighter and sharper by being there.  She kept seeing figures in her peripheral vision, figures which may well by this time be actual hallucinations; she often tried the experiment of speaking to the shades, as if getting a response from them might prove something.  But her hypotheses went unproved: none of the shades spoke to her or gave any sign that she could affect them.

            But this stage passed, and late in the afternoon Elisabeth found herself alone in the bedroom, except for the faintly malignant aftertaste of evil in the air.

            “Guess you don’t have any shame, do you, hanging out in a vicarage?” Elisabeth said in a slurred rasp.  “Well, it’s only to be expected.  Have to get your kicks somehow don’t you?”  She picked lightly at the covers over her.  “What have you got to show for it all?  Just one woman you drove crazy.  Big whoop.”

            There was no response, and Elisabeth was growing less sure that the First could hear her; but she kept on with the listless trash talk until it stopped making sense even to herself.

 

*

 

Out in the corridor, Brian glanced into Elisabeth’s bedroom again before turning shakily to Anne.  “I don’t think she’s getting any better,” he said, a fresh shiver running over his arms and up the nape of his neck.

            Anne’s eyes were incisive, fixed on Elisabeth muttering in the bed.  “It’ll take time.”

            “What if—”  Brian stopped.  Anne turned to look up at him.  “I know what—I know what she said.  But what if—what if all this really is—something she’s made up?  I mean—”

            “I don’t think she gave herself those bruises,” Anne said calmly.  It was the first time she had mentioned them, and Brian took advantage of the moment to press the point, feeling that if he said it all at once it might not feel like such a betrayal.

            “That’s what I know,” he said.  “What if she’s just being abused, and has built up all this—all this stuff about evils and dimensions and knowing the future—?”

            “As a coping mechanism, you mean,” Anne said thoughtfully.

            “Yeah.”

            Anne lifted her eyes to Brian’s face again, and his gaze skittered downward.  There was a silence.

            “It was difficult for you to say that, I know,” she said quietly.  “And you have very little evidence for believing otherwise.”

            Brian took a few breaths before answering.  “But you think what she’s saying is true.”

            A faint frown-dent appeared between Anne’s brows, and her gaze, though fixed on Elisabeth’s face, seemed to see—visions, or nothing, Brian could not tell.  “I know what I know,” she said.  “I know it isn’t just Elisabeth.”  Without looking at Brian, she responded to his answering frown.  “You may have noticed something too.  In my circles there are...weaknesses.  Upheavals.  There’s been a heavy spiritual weight falling—I’ve felt it.  Sometimes it’s all I can do to say the simplest prayer.”  Anne closed her lips and gave her head a little shake.  “This may mean nothing to you.”

            A little pang of mortification hit Brian silently: it did mean very little to him, but Anne’s air of authority meant something, and he clung to it.  “I know there’s something wrong.”  He remembered Rupert and his frown deepened bitterly.  “And I know there are some who are making it worse.”

            Anne made no answer to this.  She merely kept silence a few minutes and then said, “I think she’s falling asleep.”

            “Oh, thank God,” Brian said, not realizing he had just uttered a prayer himself.

 

*

 

Faith moved up next to Rupert at the kitchen island and mirrored the way he had braced his hands on its tiled surface.  “Don’t wanta be late for the meeting, do you?” she said, her ironic voice mild.  Even friendly, Rupert thought, after her fashion.

            He grunted: a reply in kind.

            She leaned conspiratorially closer to his shoulder and murmured, “Hey.  Been thinking of issuing you an invite to the I’m-in-B’s-Bad-Books Club.” Rupert snorted, to avoid a sob of laughter, and Faith went on:  “I used to be president, y’know, but I kinda let my membership slide a bit.  Word on the street is, you could be a good new president.”

            Rupert’s lips thinned strangely, and he realized he was smiling.

            “’Course,” Faith said, “if you don’t want such a high-profile position I’d understand.”

            Rupert turned to look at her.  She was eyeing him with a look that on anyone but Faith would be rank challenge.  She said:  “I hear there’s something to be said for taking your lumps like a gentleman.  But I was never big enough for that.”

            On the old Faith, that would have been a boast.  Rupert looked down at her: and it came to him that he had needlessly killed off all connection, all living affection, and what good would that do him?  Making the touch might make no difference at all in the big picture, but what had he to lose except his foolhardiness?

            The realization occupied hardly a moment, and involved so little a stir of emotion that it was with almost the same distance that he reached out and laid a soft hand on Faith’s shoulder for a moment.  Then he took it away, said, “Better get to the meeting,” and moved quietly away, with his hands in his pockets.

            Faith frowned after him thoughtfully.  Instead of following Rupert to the meeting, she slouched her way outside and lit up a smoke on the back porch.

            Before she could get a decent drag, Willow followed her onto the porch.  “There’s a meeting, you know,” she said.

            “Yeah,” Faith said.  She looked around languidly.  “I’ll be in in a minute.”

            But Willow wasn’t going away; instead, she was frowning and cutting her eyes between Faith and the interior of the house.  Faith could almost see the wheels turning in that red head.

            “What did you say to him?” she asked, her voice low.

            Faith shrugged.  “Nothing.  The wrong thing.  You know, the usual.”

            Willow wasn’t having any of that.  “Kinda weird when the wrong thing makes Giles smile.  Listen…you know, Giles has really been through—”

            Faith turned around.  “Is there an Obviousness virus going around or something?”  She took aim and sent her burning cigarette sailing into the sand border, shedding sparks as it went.  “There’s a meeting,” she said, blowing out her last lungful of smoke and giving Willow a wolfish smirk.

            Willow returned the smirk and, with an ironical shrug, followed Faith back into the house.

 

*

 

“Where did Anne go?” Elisabeth asked.

            Brian shifted in his chair by her bedside.  “She has work in the church.  I’ll be here till later this afternoon.”

            “You’ve been taking turns.”

            “Yeah, mostly.”

            Elisabeth lay on her back; the covers had been straightened over her while she slept.  Soft grey spring light poured into the room from the window: a candle was lit on the dresser, highlighting the Magdalene icon on the wall.  “You like her?”

            “—What, the vicar?” Brian asked, though Elisabeth could hardly have meant anyone else.  “Yeah.  Not at all what I expected.  Hey, remember when we had that _Vicar of Dibley_ marathon last Hilary term?”

            He was rewarded to see a little smile cross his friend’s face.  “Yeah.  I was thinking of that.  I don’t think we were so silly since the day you taught me how to drive British-style.”

            “God, I thought you were going to kill us both for sure.”  Brian grinned.  “And I worked hard for that car, damn it.”

            Her smile grew wider.  “And for your DVD collection.”

            “Yes, that too.  Did we snog during that marathon, or during the _Sports Night_ marathon?”

            “_Sports Night_,” Elisabeth said, confirming what Brian already knew.  “We had to go back and rewatch ‘Thespis,’ remember?”

            “Yeah,” Brian said fondly.  “Made me feel like I was twelve again.”

            Elisabeth’s smile turned quizzical.  “You started snogging at twelve?”

            “Doesn’t everyone?”

            Elisabeth didn’t answer that, but a thoughtful look came over her face.  As he watched, grief replaced pleasure in her mouth and eyes.  “Tell you what,” he said, before it could get any worse, “we could have that _West Wing_ marathon we never got around to, when you’re feeling better.”

            “Okay,” Elisabeth said softly.  She closed her eyes.

 

*

 

She woke again on Anne’s watch.  With her priest’s help, she got up, had her shower, ate something.  After her light lunch, she sat with Anne in the parlor and soaked in the light and the quiet.  Anne got out her sketchbook and began to play with sketches of an icon she meant to write.  “What’s it going to be?” Elisabeth asked her.

            “The Visitation,” Anne answered, with a small smile.

            Elisabeth gave her an appreciative blink.  She glanced over to the side: and there stood her mirror image, not quite smiling.  Elisabeth went quite still.

            “It’s all coming down now, like a curtain,” the First-Elisabeth said, and gave a mocking sigh.  “So much you could have prevented.  So much you helped to happen.  I’m quite obliged to you, you know.”

            Elisabeth made no answer.  She sat, transfixed, until Anne glanced up and saw the look on her face.  “Elisabeth?  Elisabeth, what is it?”

            Elisabeth’s eyes half-swerved to the priest, but fixed themselves on the First once more.  She waited in suspended horror, to see what would happen next.

            Anne relaxed in her chair and let the sketchbook fall in her lap as her gaze followed Elisabeth’s to the empty air.  “Let me guess,” she said.  “We are receiving a visit from the vaunted First Evil?”

            “You see,” the First-Elisabeth said, “even your priest thinks you’re insane.”

            But Anne was addressing the First.  “Do, do make yourself at home.  Oh, that’s right, I forgot.  You have no home.”  Her voice took steel at the last words, and Elisabeth gave a small squeak of pain.

            “Bitch!” the First snarled.  “I have, and shall have, everything I want.  Including your little acolyte.  _She’s_ the one with no home.  Look to her.”  And with a sound that almost created its own dust-burnt scent, the First disappeared.

            In its wake there was a silence.  Elisabeth felt the priest’s eyes on her; she willed herself to breathe, to be all right, but it was a great effort, and her mind spun helplessly.  At last she managed some words:  “Did you—did you see?”

            “At the last, I did,” Anne said calmly.  “And heard.  Is that what you’ve been experiencing?”

            Elisabeth nodded, her eyes on the place where the First had been.

            There was another silence.  Then Anne said:  “Perhaps it has occurred to you—” she picked up her sketchbook again but made no effort to resume drawing— “that this evil can only torture you successfully by borrowing your own humanity?”

            Elisabeth’s eyes grew wet.  “Are you saying humans are best at torturing each other?”

            Anne’s voice grew ironic.  “Well, they are rather good at it, but no: I meant that if you thought the First Evil has been using your darkness against you, you may not have noticed that it has to borrow your light to do it.”

            “My sanity,” Elisabeth faltered, “is not what it was.”

            Instead of contradicting her, Anne let that settle, then said:  “You are not quite destroyed yet.”

            Elisabeth swallowed.  The well of grief had subsided.  “Someone should tell Rupert,” she murmured.  “Someone should tell him this.”

            “Was it he who gave you the bruises on your arm?”

            Elisabeth froze for a moment.  Then she looked down and pushed back the sleeve of her shirt.  The bruises had quite healed; not even a shadow was left.  It seemed a part of her had thought they would always be there, or that the world would end before they disappeared, whichever came first.

            “Can you tell me?” Anne asked her quietly.

            With her eyes on her idle hands, Elisabeth nodded.

 

*

 

It was moments like this that reminded Rupert how young Dawn was: she was following him closely down the hospital corridor, making almost no sound, her eyes wide.  He paused at a crossing to read the room numbers, and she almost cannoned into him.  He put back a reassuring hand, but it didn’t quite touch her before he moved on.

            By the time they had reached Xander’s room, however, Dawn had regained her stoic calm.  It was Rupert who was having difficulty submerging his visceral grief.

            Xander managed a flicker of a smile before closing his unbandaged eye—his only eye, now.  Dawn pursed her lips and moved around the other side of the bed to take his hand, leaving Rupert the chair on the near side.  Rupert took the chair without quibbling; there was a faint thrum of weakness in his knees to match the one in his throat.

            “Hey,” Dawn said faintly.  “Are you...are you feeling better?  Is the pain going down?”

            “A bit,” Xander said.  “Percocet is a nice invention.”

            It was the only gambit for a joke Xander had in him, and Dawn and Rupert both knew it.  “Well,” Rupert said lightly, lacing his hands together till the knuckles hurt, “they say it’s all fun and games till someone loses an eye.”

            Xander grunted, Dawn looked at him reproachfully, and Rupert fell silent altogether.

            They didn’t say much more, any of them, for a while; Dawn eventually let go of Xander’s hand and began to wander the hospital room, occupying her attention with its paraphernalia.

            Xander looked over at Rupert, who was relacing his fingers and concentrating on slow, steady breaths.  “So...what’s going on out there?” he asked quietly.  “What’s happening?”

            Rupert did not lift his eyes from his hands.  Everything in him went still; the stillness of despair.  “I don’t know.”

            “Everybody’s regrouping, right?” Xander persisted.  “There’s gonna be a plan.  Did Buffy...?”

            “Buffy,” Rupert said, “has not divulged any plans to me.”  He did not think it would be quite safe to congratulate himself privately for keeping the bitterness out of his voice.

            Xander was silent for a moment.  Rupert could feel his one dark eye trained on him in a concentrated gaze.  When Xander spoke again, it was with a passion all the stronger for being very quiet.

            “Why are you letting her get away with this?” he said.

            “Xander,” Dawn said, as if about to launch a defense of Buffy in her absence; but Xander glanced at her, and she retreated back into her stoic upright silence.  Xander returned his eye to Rupert and waited.

            “...Well,” Rupert said at last, “I was wrong, was I not?”

            “Don’t know that for sure,” Xander said.  “Don’t know anything for sure.  You tried to do _something_, at least, just like all of us—”

            “The wrong thing,” Rupert said softly.  “Which, as it turns out, is worse than nothing at all.”

            “So you’re just going to let her punish you.”

            “What else can I do?” Rupert said.  He unlaced his fingers and studied the pink palms: a killer’s hands, a torturer’s.  “I haven’t got the moral high ground, after what I did to her.”

            Xander broke the little silence that followed.  “We...are still talking about Buffy, right?”

            Rupert gave him no answer.  He sat, his shoulders bowed, in the chair and waited for the wetness in his eyes to subside.

            “Giles?” Dawn said, tentative in his peripheral vision.

            Rupert lifted his head and cleared his throat.  “No,” he said.  “It doesn’t matter.”

            From the corner of his eye he saw Dawn lift her eyebrows.  “Like hell,” Xander said.

            Rupert stood wearily.  He had to get out, walk or something.  “You’re right.  It does,” he said softly, “matter.  And if we live, I’ll see if I can pick up the pieces.  Dawn, you’ll be all right here for a bit?”

            Dawn nodded silently.  Behind the frown and the primmed lips, Rupert could see in her face a growing force of—decision, or understanding, he wasn’t sure what.  He looked down at Xander in the bed: Xander’s mouth was rather too firm, and the bandages and the bedclothes made him look smaller, as if he were a boy again.  Rupert laid a hand on his shoulder, then moved it after a moment to the top of his head, to rest on the other man’s soft mussed hair.

            Without any more words he left the room and strode fast down the hall.  He needed oxygen.

 

*

 

Elisabeth moved swiftly from room to room in her flat, packing a gym bag.  Anne stood out of the way, holding the scribbled packing list Elisabeth had made, occasionally helping to mark off the contents of the bag as it filled.

            At last Elisabeth zipped the bag shut and heaved it over one shoulder.  “Thanks,” she said, “for...well, just thanks.”

            Anne nodded silently.

            “You’ll explain to Brian what I’m doing?”

            “Yes,” Anne said.

            “But don’t,” Elisabeth said, “tell him where I’m going.  I don’t think he’d understand.  And I don’t want him coming after me.”

            The fine frown lines moved in the vicar’s face, and she reached to touch Elisabeth’s shoulder.  “Are you sure you’ll be all right?  Alone, I mean?”

            Elisabeth drew a long breath.  “I don’t know,” she said finally.  “I have to find out.”

            Anne let go of her shoulder and nodded.

            They left her flat, and Elisabeth locked up, her hands fumbling over the keys from loss of muscle memory.  Anne walked her to the bus stop and waited with her until the bus trundled into view and stopped to admit her.

            On the step Elisabeth turned and gave her priest a small smile.  “I’ll see you,” she said, “if the world doesn’t end.”

            “I’ll be here,” Anne said.

            Elisabeth paid her fare; the doors slid closed, and the bus pulled out and away, leaving the vicar of St. John’s church standing alone, tight-lipped, thoughtful fists on hips.

            “Godspeed,” Anne said quietly, under the roar of exhaust.


	8. Chapter 8

She had only been to his flat once before, to bring him a housewarming gift the summer after Buffy died, two lifetimes ago.  She checked the address twice against the slip of paper in her hand before going up the steps to his front door.

            He would not be there.  He might never be there; and this was the place to wait.

            She had not thought about what might happen if he had locked the door and left no key, glossing only vague ideas about asking his neighbors or his landlord for assistance.  Now, standing before his door, she wondered at herself for coming all this way for what might very well be a fool’s errand.  Hitching her bag up higher on her shoulder, she reached for the latch and turned it.

            It was unlocked.  Elisabeth pushed it open an inch and stared at it in a vague shock.  Then suspiciously pushed it further open and waited a moment before stepping into the darkness of the foyer.

            Nothing happened.  Elisabeth let her eyes adjust to the dimness: she saw the familiar limns of his furniture forward in the living area; an amphora stood with stone dignity in the foyer at her right; next to it a small table laden with mail gathered thick dust.  More mail crackled under her feet, pushed from its place under the letterbox in the door.

            She reached behind her and closed the door quietly, leaving herself alone with the flat’s darkness.  And that was when she saw the crossbow, suspended she wasn’t sure how at eye level, poised to cover the entrance.  Under her feet, under the mail, a rune glowed faintly, malevolently.

            Elisabeth waited: either Rupert’s home would kill her, or it would leave her alone, and at the moment either would suit.

            She was rewarded when the darkness disgorged a small shape: a cat, dusty-black, with eyes somewhere between emerald and topaz.  It came to her feet and sat down, blinking up at her.  Elisabeth looked down and addressed it, clearing her disused voice:

            “I didn’t realize Rupert had a familiar.”

            The cat gave a double wink, whether in disdain at her stupidity, or regal acceptance, she wasn’t sure.

            “Or maybe,” she mused, “you’re some other sort of guardian provided for him.”

            The cat offered her no answer, but she was beginning to think its opinion of her was rising.  At any rate it wasn’t triggering the deathtraps or leaping to scratch her eyes out.

            “May I come in?” she asked the cat.

            For answer it twisted to its feet and walked away, as if to say, Do what you will.

            Elisabeth shrugged and moved forward.  No arrows flew, no magicks seized her.

            It seemed that Rupert’s home had found her acceptable.

 

*

 

She put down her bag in his bedroom and turned on the bedside lamp, thinking that the sight of Rupert’s things would be more palpably evocative than his scent, which lay over the air in his flat like a damp, stale blanket.  But she was oddly unmoved by the familiar shapes of the lamp, his bedstead, the comforter.

            The living area was but little different.  Elisabeth turned on all the lights she could find—the afternoon light was failing—and stood looking around her, taking in the jeweled colors of his Tiffany lamps and rich red drapes.  He had a new armchair, plusher and more sturdy than his last; a purple chenille throw drooped over one arm and the seat.  The whole room was primed to comfort the soul who inhabited it; but Elisabeth felt empty.

            “Home sweet home,” she said, and went dully into the kitchen, to put on the kettle.

 

*

 

Rupert settled himself gingerly in an unoccupied armchair, out of the way of the traffic of wounded and sleeping in the house.  He was almost immediately seized with an urge to get up again, to go upstairs to Faith, or to Willow in the dining room; to go out to the back porch or the kitchen or go count weapons in the basement.  The livingroom, unlit, carried an odd, dim grey light from outside that mesmerized him enough that he stayed where he was.

            Willow passed through, saw him, and altered course.  She was going to touch him, he saw, and sure enough, she did: slipped a hand behind his shoulder and smoothed the spot just below his neck.  “Giles,” she said, “there’s time for you to sleep.”

            He shook his head automatically.  “Can’t,” he said.  “I can’t possibly.”

            She accepted this, and went away wordlessly to the kitchen.  Rupert leaned his head back and closed his eyes.

            When Willow returned through the livingroom five minutes later, Rupert was profoundly asleep.

 

*

 

Elisabeth went out once, for groceries.  She stocked Rupert’s empty fridge with milk and cheese, juice and eggs; lined up ten tins of tuna (for both herself and the cat) on the counter.  The cat seemed very grateful for this: Elisabeth noticed that a window had been left ajar for it to come and go, hunting as it pleased in the neighborhood, but the pickings couldn’t have been very lush.  She hummed to herself tunelessly as she tore off a hunk of one of the French loaves she had bought, sliced some cheese to go with it, and carried her meal and cup of tea to the armchair, where she curled up and ate silently.

            Her physical needs were provided for, and this was enough to keep her suspended in a dull spiritual inertia.  It was better not to feel things...well, not better, but Elisabeth could sense the darkness and pain curling at the edges of her consciousness and did not want to invite them any further into the midst of her attention.  She didn’t know, when it all broke past the recent smokescreens and alarums of her mental constitution, whether she would survive it.

            This was more or less what she had come here to find out, but now it had come to the point and Elisabeth found herself helplessly clinging to numbness with a dull desperation that she knew would only make matters worse.

            She leaned her head back against the upholstery of the armchair and closed her eyes.  The cat came up into her lap in a short vault and settled itself down comfortably, tucking its paws in and squinting at her over its shoulder.  As his comforting warmth joined hers, Elisabeth found herself lulled into a doze, and from thence into a sound sleep.

 

*

 

It had all happened before: Elisabeth lying on the bed, book propped open on her stomach, head on numerous pillows, the damp coolness of the country night flowing in through the open window.  Rupert in the doorway, smiling, then coming forward to sit down on the bed and nestle her feet in his lap.  Elisabeth reading, her breathing buoyant with his presence.  The delicious strokes of his long fingers caressing her feet, soles and insteps, toes and ankles.  The book lowering and finally falling, her gaze losing focus, their mutual presence carrying them to a simple, quiet place that would prove to sustain them almost long enough.

            Almost long enough.  The memory was now, without any change and yet with a fundamental change, deeply wrong.

            Now, he held her feet and as before, he elected to give her a homemade pedicure: but now instead of eliciting her benevolence and amusement, it was an echo of future grief.  He was washing her feet, his face in the lamplight carved into lines of almost medieval sorrow.

            Elisabeth found she could speak.  “Do you know the meaning behind the name of ‘Maundy Thursday’?”

            And he could answer, as they acted their memory, these new words, with sadness but without strain.  “Maundy, from _mandatum_, commandment.  The greatest commandment.”

            “I will have my turn,” she said softly.

            “I will weep,” he said.

            “Yes,” she said, “you will.”

            The echo of their memory continued: he pulled out a bottle of blood-red nail enamel.  “I am sorry I do not have any wine,” he said, not looking up.  “I have only blood.”

            “Like Winston Churchill.”

            He gave a small, bitter snort as he applied impossibly bright polish to her big toenail.  “More like Neville Chamberlain.”

            “They are both England.”

            His voice, answering, was small and low.  “I am only a man.”

            “That,” Elisabeth said, softer, “is what I wanted.”

            They were not following the memory now: the country air pouring through the window of Rupert’s house became the blatant insinuation of bright daylight infiltrating the empty halls of a brand-new, abandoned high school building.  Elisabeth swung a sword with unaccustomed practice against a ragged, claw-nailed creature, and another, and another.  She was he, but she had lost him. 

Then the shape coming for her was the cat, steady-eyed and steady-tailed in the darkness.  It jumped upon her belly and settled itself down into the hunkered shape of a loaf of bread, and Elisabeth found it difficult to breathe.  The cat was glaring into her eyes: it was Death-in-a-shape, come to link her selves across dimensions and claim her forever—shimmering blue dazzling her eyes—faces wide-eyed surrounding her—

_All you have to do is let go_—

“I don’t know if I can,” Rupert said.

“You will be compelled to.  It will be all right,” she said.

“I am less than a man,” he said.

“You are enough,” she said.

Silence, and she repeated what she had said before.  “You are what I wanted.”

A droplet of rain fell on her foot.  Gentle fingers wiped it off.  “I will weep,” he said.

“You will live to weep,” she said, and as she said it, she felt her voice strong in her throat and her eyes clearing from grayness to the dim light of Rupert’s flat in Bath.

The cat lifted its head sleepily to look at her.  She looked back at it, back at the stillness of the living area.  It was all very commonplace: and it was this that tore the last stitch of reserve from her heart.

Her chin fell forward, and she wept.

 

*

 

Rupert woke, his breath smacked back into him by the flurry of movement and voices that now surrounded him.  He stood up slowly, blinking hard, and let himself be drawn into the hubbub.

            It was all so very unnatural—this movement, this spate of planning and waiting, planning and waiting.  He went about in it with almost more dreamlike abstraction than he had done while actually dreaming.  Something, half within him, half—out there somewhere—had been settled, had been laid sealed on the table for him to open in good time.

            It gave him no present comfort, but it was more or less enough.

            “So how was your ten minutes of sleep?” Willow asked as she brushed by him.

            Had it only been ten minutes? 

            For answer, Rupert shrugged, and nothing more was said.

 

*

 

She was caught up in the pain now: it burned through the cells of her body like spiritual borax, following her in her rising and her sitting, when she ate and when she slept, during black night and pitiful day.  It almost mattered not, now, that the apocalypse was burning with a similar pain halfway round the world: she was caught up: the trial had begun: and she was found wanting.

            Time passed, in sickening lurches, so that a few days later the detached thought came to Elisabeth that the battle, whatever its outcome, must have been fought by now.

            It didn’t matter.  She paced the length and breadth of Rupert’s flat, the pain seizing her, dragging her, body and soul, down into worse than death.  There were casualties.  And she was one.

 

*

 

Rupert went briefly to take the night air on the back porch, waiting in the darkness.  Next to him stood Jenny Calendar, whom he had loved and lost, several lifetimes ago.

            “You’re mine, now, you know,” she said.  “And so is she.”

            Rupert gave a small, bitter smile.  “And which ‘she’ would that be, now?” he said softly.

            The First laughed, and became Buffy standing beside him.  “Any she you happen to care about.  I was talking about Elisabeth.”

            Perhaps it was true.  But perhaps his dream had been truer.

            Rupert began to laugh, quietly at first, but then a little louder, baring his teeth to the night.  The First drew back from him.  Perhaps it could sense that beneath the weary defiance and the touch of mania, Rupert’s laughter sprang from a true mocking humor.

            “See you in the morning, love,” Elisabeth’s shade said, and the First disappeared.

 

*

 

            Her hands wandered, to touch things, trinkets on his shelves, the spines of books, the surfaces of fabric, the edges of glass.  The small points of contact were scarcely enough to link her to something beyond the miasma of fuzzed agony consuming her.  And then they were not enough.

            She did not know how much time had passed when she sat empty-eyed on Rupert’s bed, the consuming still going on, perhaps permanently.  That did not bear thinking of.

            In her hand she held the bottle of tranquilizers that had been prescribed for her.  She stared at it with the madness of a berserker about to throw himself into the fray forever.  _The death you should have had two years ago_....

            There were enough of them to do that.

 

*

 

Brian Whitaker woke from a sound sleep to a familiar voice, and saw Elisabeth’s form standing near the “doorway” of bookshelf and wall in his flat.  He sat up.

            “Elisabeth,” he said hoarsely, “you came back.”

            Elisabeth did not answer.

            “Elisabeth?” he said, wiping at his eyes and jaw and peering hard into the darkness.

            “There are casualties,” Elisabeth said.  “And I am one.”

            “No,” Brian said.  “You’re not a casualty.  You’re living.”

            “I, living?”  Elisabeth gave an empty laugh Brian had never heard before.  She moved casually a few feet into the room.  “You know, I hadn’t been planning to come to you,” she said, “but it is fun to get a good laugh in at how terribly naive you are.”

            Brian stared warily at her.  “I’m not sure what you’re talking about,” he said.

            “No,” Elisabeth’s form agreed, “you haven’t a clue.  You are sleeping safe at home, and you haven’t got a single clue what’s happening to your friend—how close to the edge she is.  You’ll be too late to do anything for her.”

            “You’ve gone mad,” Brian said softly.  “That’s what it is.  Elisabeth—”

            “You are a fool,” Elisabeth said, coldness in every line of her voice and body.

            Brian shucked off the bedclothes and got up to go to her.  “It’s all right,” he said soothingly.  “Let me get you something—”  His hand should have found her shoulder, but instead he touched air, and something rotten stained his soul.

            “Thank you for the offer,” Elisabeth said mockingly, “but I have a date with an apocalypse this morning.  I’ll come back and devour you when I have the leisure.”

            And suddenly Brian was alone.

            Ten minutes later he was hammering on the door of the vicarage, his sneakers untied, his hair wild.  Anne answered, blinking and squinting, clutching a soft wrapper tightly about her.  “Brian?  Whatever—?”

            “You have to tell me where she is.  Where is she!”

            “What happened?” Anne asked.

            “Tell me where she is!”

            “Tell me what happened,” Anne said, steel uncoiling in her voice.

            Brian was able to give little more than a very incoherent account of what had happened, but it was enough to give Anne the general idea.  “You’ve received a visit from the First Evil,” she said.

            “The First Evil, fucking bollocks!” Brian shouted.  A light went on in the block of flats next door.  “She’s on the edge.”

            “Is that what it told you,” Anne said.  “Well, if it’s true there’s nothing you can do about it.”

            “The hell you say,” Brian said.  “Tell me where she is.”

            “No,” Anne said.

            “Please,” Brian said, and with that involuntary word he knew he had lost.

            “No,” Anne said.  But her face had softened.  She stood back to let him in.

            Shaking so hard he could hardly move, Brian went ahead inside the vicarage.

            The street grew quiet again, and after ten minutes the light next door went out.

 

*

 

Many hours and an apocalypse away from Brian’s frenzy, Elisabeth shifted the focus of her eyes from the bottle of pills to the cat, sitting urgently before her, looking into her face.

            “Just think what it would do to Rupert,” she whispered.

            She held the bottle down so that the cat could fit its teeth round it and carry it away.

            “Hide it good,” she said, as the cat disappeared through the doorway.

 

*

 

“All I have to do is let go,” she told herself, getting up from Rupert’s bed and padding into the living area.  But she needed something to anchor that commitment, so that she could let go moment to moment.

            She arranged a throw pillow on the floor, and laid before it a Prayer Book and psalter she had found tucked away on a shelf.  She lit a candle, knelt, opened the book, and began reading psalms aloud, letting the weight of the words strengthen her voice.

            Time passed as she read: her voice cracked on dryness, but she kept on, until she ran out of psalms and the whispered thread that was all that was left of her voice fell silent.  The candle burned down, dripping, guttered, and went out.  Elisabeth’s eyes were closed.  She put down the psalter and lifted her hands.

            And there something fit that had merely made a tenuous contact before: she moved, outside the groove of time, from a palimpsest of selves to one self, kneeling, regardless of whether it made any difference, and lifting herself and what she knew of the world in her hands.

            For a timeless moment she knelt still, in the place she was meant to be, silent, finished.  Then she opened her eyes.  The last thread of smoke from the burnt-out candle dissipated before her.  She lowered her hands and looked around her, at the faint grey light creeping among the dark shapes in the flat.

            It was morning.

 

*

 

After that, it was merely a matter of waiting: not painless, but peaceful at last.

 

*

 

Squinting against the bright afternoon sunlight, Rupert saw Xander coming down the concrete path to the door of the barracks room he’d claimed for himself.  He moved quickly to avoid him, but not quickly enough: just outside the doorway Xander cornered him, gentle but insistent.  “Hey, Giles,” he said, as if to a spooked horse.

            “Xander,” Rupert said, trying to be nonchalant.  “I was just going to go and talk to Buffy.  We’re planning to leave here soon, you know.”

            “Yeah, she told me,” Xander said, not letting him go.

            “There’s a lot to do.”  Rupert made a motion to ease around him.  “Excuse me.”

            Xander’s hand came up and gripped his shoulder.  “Hang on a minute there, guy,” he said.  “I need to talk to you.”

            Rupert rolled his eyes desperately.  “Xander, can’t this—whatever it is—be—?”

            “Nope,” Xander said calmly.  Rupert was still the taller man, but Xander had been made somehow immovable by the passages of grief, and the difference in height fazed the younger man not at all.  He broke the non-news of his purpose without preamble.  “It’s time for you to talk to somebody.”

            “There are things we have to do,” Rupert said, not meeting Xander’s eye; but it made no difference, Xander was no nearer to letting go of him.

            “It’s time for you to talk to somebody,” he repeated.  “It doesn’t matter who it is.  It can be one of us; it can be that Father Matthew guy you brought us here to.  You’ll probably never see him again, so maybe he’s your man.”

            Rupert laced his reply with razor sarcasm.  “I am not interested in talking about my feelings in some self-indulgent Californian manner with a shrink, a priest, or any of you lot,” he said.  “And I wish you’d drop this.”

            “I did,” Xander said.  “Several times.  And nobody wants you to talk about your feelings.”

            Rupert brushed Xander’s hand off his shoulder sharply.  “Then what the hell is this all about?”

            “It’s not about the feelings,” Xander said, unmoved.  “It’s about laying it out, before we go any further.  It’s about leaving the Hellmouth at the Hellmouth.”

            “Oh—” Rupert made a derisive noise.

            “You’re gonna talk to somebody,” Xander said, holding Rupert’s eyes with his one steady brown one, “before we leave here.”  
            “Oh, fuck this for a—” Rupert reached to shove Xander aside, but the other man gripped him and they struggled for a moment.  Rupert felt his dignity slipping.  He shook himself free of Xander’s grasp with a vicious, quick motion, and stepped back.  They stood, breathing a little harder.

            “Come on, old man,” Xander said, beckoning him with both hands.  “You think you can take the one-eyed guy?”

            “It’s not funny,” Rupert said.

            “Who’s laughing?”

            Rupert swung at him, a blow so pathetic it was just as well that Xander ducked it easily.  “Is that all you got?  Come on, Giles.  That was sad.”

            His fists clenched, Rupert watched the other man’s face for the right opening.  “I could kill you in seconds,” he said softly.

            “You could try,” Xander said.

            They began to circle each other a little; Rupert had completely forgotten his mission to get around Xander and make his escape.  “I’m beginning to think this is something _you_ want,” Rupert said.

            “Your comebacks used to be so much better than that,” Xander said.  “The First really took it out of you, didn’t it?”

            “None of your business,” Rupert said, not taking the bait.

            “Maybe not,” Xander said.  “But it’s your business.  You ever going to attend to it, or are you just going to wither up on the vine?”

            “If metaphors were cocktails—,” Rupert said—

            “—Watchers would ride,” Xander finished.

            Rupert almost dropped his hands.  “That makes no _sense_,” he said, his voice rising.

            “One crazy man to another,” Xander said.  “It’s not like you’re really hiding anything, you know.  Everybody knows you’re cracking up.”

            “And who gives a merry shit?” Rupert inquired.

            Xander stood still and gave him, to the life, the quizzical look Rupert had inflicted on him for years.  “Um, hello?” he said.  “Challenging you to a pointless fistfight here.  What does that tell you?  Giles, are you going to hit me or not?”

            When he put it that way....Rupert dropped his hands to his sides.

            The two men stood looking at one another for a moment.

            “What do you want from me?” Rupert said at last, weary to the bone.

            “I already told you,” Xander said.

            There was another silence.  Then Rupert said quietly:  “I doubt I could tell it and....”

            “...survive?” Xander said.  “Well, your survival prospects look pretty grim anyway, so what do you have to lose?”

            Xander and Rupert shared a brief mordant smile.

 

*

 

Elisabeth developed a very simple routine, one that spanned days without hurry.  She slept in the armchair long hours at a time, ate when she remembered, showered in the evenings, read psalms when it hurt.  The cat stayed close, becoming part of the rhythm: she began to feed it, and then herself, morning and evening.

            Her rhythm grew slowly, but it was already beginning to take to itself a center.

            She was waiting.

 

*

 

Another airliner, another long flight.  But this time the urgency was minimal, the mission spread to a farther reach of time than hours and days.  Rupert kept his eyes closed for much of the flight, dozing lightly, resting.

            He had tried, and failed, to get hold of Elisabeth.  She was not answering her phone at home, and his inquiries at Magdalen College had proved equally fruitless.  A faint thread of foreboding had crept into him, but after some consideration he decided the only thing he could do at the moment was go home.  There he could gather himself for a concerted effort to find her, if she was still alive.  If she would still see him.  Though what he would say if he made it past all those things and saw her, he had no idea.

            First, he would go home.

 

*

 

Elisabeth sat dozing in the chair.  Her hands held no book, her mind lay within her still and quiet.  It had already come to her that soon she was going to have to figure out what she would do, if Rupert wasn’t coming back.  But there was still time.  She let her eyes fall softly closed and sank deeper into sleep.

            The cat made a sharp move in her lap, raising its head.  Elisabeth opened her eyes.

            There was someone at the door.  A scrape of footsteps, a rattle at the door handle, then a jingle of keys.  The landlord, perhaps, Elisabeth thought: but she knew better.

            Both she and the cat watched intently as the door opened and the late afternoon light spilled in past a tall shape.  The door shut, and Rupert shuffled wearily into the living area, let his pack fall with a thump to the floor, looked up, and locked gazes with Elisabeth in the chair.

            There was a complete and lasting silence until the cat broke it by leaping out of Elisabeth’s lap and coming toward Rupert, stopping halfway to sit and watch him expectantly.  But Rupert’s eyes did not leave Elisabeth’s.

            Elisabeth cleared her throat and said, “Your home gave me its hospitality.  I think I have you to thank for that.”

            He had no answer to this, except a faint straightening of the shoulders.

            Elisabeth got up slowly, putting the chenille throw off her lap, and stood facing him in the silence.

            Across his face flitted the aborted motions of his thought: the weariness, the relief and wonder of seeing her, the paralyzing attempt to find something to say.  Her gaze took in the bow of his shoulders, the faint stoop of exhaustion in his frame.  She said:

            “I’m thinking now isn’t the time for talking.”  She linked her hands in front of her gently.  “I’m thinking it’s more the time for you to have your shower and a week-long nap.”

            There was a faint movement in his lips, and his head made the tiniest backward cant.  But he made no move to do as she suggested.

            She lifted an encouraging hand to brush the air lightly.  “Go on,” she said.  “It’s okay.”

            Slowly he moved to take his eyes from her and look down at the cat, which had come to sit directly in front of him, waiting for its greeting.  He knelt briefly to stroke its whiskers and exchange a silent hello; then he stood, a visible ache in every joint, and moved quietly off toward the bedroom.

 

*

 

She waited quietly in the chair, listening to the sounds of the shower, and then later those of shaving and tooth-brushing.  She went into the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea and stood there sipping it, thinking.

            When the flat was silent again she ventured out of the kitchen and toward the bedroom, peering in tentatively.

            He lay sprawled on the bed, still in his bathrobe, his hair damp, his face half-buried in the pillow, one stray hand limp on the coverlet.

            She went forward, making no noise, and bent a little to study his face in the lamplight.

            There were new lines: he looked his age and more, and his lips were drawn small and close, as of a man dead or grieving.

            She felt a faint urge to touch him that only grew the longer she looked.  But she did not know whether he was still hers to touch.  Perhaps the sickness of battle had consumed the link between them.  It was too soon to tell, and Elisabeth found herself unable to worry about it.  The thing she had found, waiting, praying alone in Rupert’s flat—this thing was now where she lived, and would live whether it was with Rupert or not. 

            It seemed clear, however, that she was willing to accept him, even on terms of certain difficulty.

            She hesitated only once before reaching out to stroke a fingertip along the new silver at his temple.  Then she eased the folded blanket at the foot of the bed out from under his feet, spread it over him, and went quietly from the room.

 

*

 

After gathering the few possessions she had brought, and making one last trip out for groceries, she donned her jacket and wrote Rupert a note at the table.

 

_            R,_

_            I’ve gone home.  You’ll find fresh milk and eggs in the fridge, and tuna for the cat.  He seems to like half a can morning and evening._

_            When you are ready, come to _ _Oxford_ _, and we will talk._

_            Yours,_

_            E._

 

She stepped back to look it over once; then, straightening her shoulders and drawing a breath, she turned her back on it, said goodbye to the cat, hefted her bag, and let herself quietly out of Rupert’s flat.

            The air outside was cool and soft, and the world lay waiting before her, undestroyed.

 

*

 

_finis_


End file.
